Learned the GUI way first and honestly it saved my butt more than the terminal ever did. Clicking through a visual merge tool lets you see both sides of a conflict side by side, and that beats squinting at diff markers in a black window any day. Half the people I know who swear by the command line are just memorizing flags they copy from Stack Overflow anyway. A good GUI shows you what's actually happening instead of hiding it behind a command you don't really get. Sounds like bad merge habits cost you those three weeks, not the lack of a terminal.

My roll bag zipper died too, used a bungee cord for a month.

Sounds like typical Best Buy laziness more than some huge security disaster. Some sales rep probably just logged in to show off the AI features and forgot to sign out, happens all the time. Yeah it's sloppy but who's really gonna dig through some random rep's email at a store demo?