Re: rebase is important and useful
You need to discard part of the merge history "all the time" on public branches? I have to side with Hipp on this one; that sounds like bad practice, frankly.
Pretty much all the rebase use cases I've ever seen boil down to "Shit, I've made a mess. How can I pretend to the world that didn't happen?" Maybe there are good use cases for it, but I haven't seen any examples.