I think my memory is probably colored by BitKeeper being my first DVCS. I was never a heavy user of it.

I was exposed to BitKeeper when I was managing my team's CVS server. On my next team, we moved to svn, which always felt like cvs with better porcelain from a developer perspective, but when administering that server fell onto my plate, I liked it a lot better than CVS. And I thought BitKeeper would be nicer from a developer perspective.

Then on my next team, we used mercurial. I really, really, really liked mercurial, both as a developer and as a dev infrastructure administrator. It also sucked a lot less on Windows than git or BitKeeper.

The last time I had to decide for a new team, mercurial and git were the obvious options. I went with git because that was clearly what the world liked best, and because bringing new team members up to speed would require less from me that way.

All that goes to say... my direct comparison of git and bitkeeper came from when bitkeeper was mature and git decidedly was not. Then I lumped it in with mercurial (which I really would still prefer, right now) and fossil (ditto). You're probably exactly right about BK.

Conceptually git is more powerful. But I recall the bitkeeper CLI being far more sensible in its interface.

It had its own weird quirks, and sometimes revealed that it was a front for a single file with a lot of funnily-formatted lines. We're just separated from it in time, and you can only truly hate what is familiar.