I was a heavy darcs user at the time and the impression I got was part of the name git in the first place was that it was intentionally the "dumb, dirty, get things done" answer to darcs' (sometimes problematic) smarts. (Remember, the British slang definition of git is "an unpleasant or contemptible person".)

It's also interesting that both Mercurial and git were spun out of the BitKeeper fiasco (BitKeeper was a commercial product that allowed free hosting for Open Source projects, up until the fiasco where they decided they were bored hosting Open Source) by Linux kernel members. Mercurial actually wound up with lead and if I recall correctly was much more usable faster than git was. The problems with Mercurial were that it was written in Python and git was lead by Linus himself and in the apparently more preferable to kernel hackers C, perl, bash, awk, sed, spit, and duct tape development environment.