I'm excited if I can get my colleagues to use version control.

Do you think that they would use a VCS that was less invasive and more transparent to their workflow, like dropbox?

I'm thinking of making a VCS that simply runs in the background and

- Automatically records every file save (effectively a git commit without a message)

- Allows adding messages through tagging (like git tag)

- Handles 'branching' just by asking you make a copy of the directory with a different name, properly understands how to diff/merge/etc copied files/directories that have since diverged.

- Has built in support for large files

Almost certainly, yes.

Git is way more complicated than VMware.

Use SVN just like everybody else.

You obviously don't know many researchers (if any).