Agreed. I work for a business that provides fairly heavy RIAs, which we custom build based on customer needs on (typically) very short time frames. The applications are used by thousands of different users on massively varied combinations of OS and browser, and the flash+flex stack is the only way we can develop robust apps to the required deadlines. It's a shame but it's the way it is currently.

Some of the arguments against merging made in this article seem a little strange, for example saying "If folks on topic branches rebase, there will not be any conflicts on merge" after previously stating "It’s also a great idea to rebase periodically - several times a day", as there would also be no merge conflicts if the branch was merged in periodically as well. If merge commits are so abhorrent, just alias git log to git log --no-merges

Rebase is not just a history win, but also a patch review win.