The issue is that this could have been fixed years ago. All the information needed to move forward today was also available the last time this got brought up. Fixing it then would have better for git's users (because they wouldn't have freaked out over this) and better for git (because it never would have even come up in the SHA1 discussion) and better for Linus (because he wouldn't have had to spend an hour writing a blog post about this). So why not do it then?

It's frustrating, because Linus clearly isn't stupid. And yet sometimes he does stuff like this where I can't help but go "how did you not see the unforced error you were making?".