Miles Bader [off-list ref] writes:
[I do wonder how on earth the current awkward behavior was accepted in
the first place...]
That's actually very easy to explain. Both the contributor and the
maintainer were rather familiar with the workflow using tools before
"rebase -i" appeared, and to them, editing an existing commit was
equivalent to first plant yourself on the commit to be amended, issue
"commit --amend", and continue on with other tasks (similarly, "picking" an
existing commit is to cherry-pick the commit to the state whatever the
previous sequence of commands left). In other words, they both thought in
terms of the underlying command sequence and it did not appear unnatural
at all to them.