This attitude of "oh, the only reason it's popular is because people want to feel superior for learning something hard" is poisonous to productive discussion. If you're going to be cynical about it, at least favor the "OMG Linus Torvalds maed it" explanation over the one that requires active assholery on the part of Git users. Better yet, try assuming that most people are making a reasonable effort to be rational based on their limited knowledge. But what you did right there, please don't do that.
Anecdotal of course, but in my limited experience, I've seen plenty of superiority complexes and generally assholery, but no Linus fanboyism. I don't like it, but to me it seems like a perfectly unsurprising aspect of the software industry.
Your idea (my interpretation) that the industry mostly consists of people having productive discussions seems more off base. Yes, that's the way it should be, and usually is on HN and similar forums, but out in the larger real world, arrogance, superiority, etc are the order of the day.
Yes, I know the real world sucks. In light of that, let's try not to actively make it worse. Applying Hanlon's Razor aggressively is the easiest thing we can do. And don't forget the selection bias from the fact that jerks are more likely to make themselves noticed than rational people.
Or you could mention the elephant in the room, the fact that git is orders of magnitude faster than mercurial when your project grows beyond the "small" size. Mercurial would be unusable on something like the Linux kernel, and uncomfortably slow on a lot of other projects. And big projects tend to have more developer mindshare-- funny how that works...
Except there are large projects using Mercurial without issue. See Facebook for example. If you want to look at open source projects, all of Mozilla uses mercurial[0] with just the standard hg-web server. And it's size is comparable (same order of magnitude) as the linux kernel)[1].
If you want to make such claims, I'd love to see data backing it up.
