Those were incremental improvements over a bad design. I recall that Linus specifically said that when he looked at CVS it was inferior to emailing tarballs and patches. Having worked with CVS for 3 years, and then SVN for 5 years before trying git, I am inclined to agree. Those systems were easy enough to start with, but I never felt that I grokked them even after years of use. Their quirks did not make logical sense, they were just implications of nonsensical internals.

It's possible that git also is fundamentally flawed in a way that some genius will reveal down the line, but I'm just sticking my neck out my neck like so many futurists before me and say that I don't see it as likely.