Distrusting git
The real problem here is:... "and I was getting ready to commit a series of important changes" ... Before doing so, I want to merge in the recent changes from the remote master, so I do the familiar git pull. ... "maybe I’m going slightly crazy after 3 days straight hacking" ...Do I interpret this correctly as that the author has not commited any changes for 3 days?With SVN there may be an excuse for this, but with Git the right way is to commit as often as possible, and then squash your commits before pushing them. With such a workflow the problem would have been a non-problem - just use git reflog and checkout your previous version.Of course you wouldn't use a git pull then, but just rebase your local commits on top of master.Learn how to use your tools, instead of complaining about them!