Want to contribute back to the Drupal community? Don't be afraid, Git is not as hard as you might think. There are plenty of resources available to those who search. Drupal recently switched over to Git from CVS.
Our server recently died a few times (swap exploded and didn't serve any requests), but since then we've changed a few figures in the configuration files and everything seems fine (for now).
If there's one thing I've learned about upgrading Drupal sites, it's that you're going to have to do the same 50 steps over and over and over again to fix things as they fail. It's awful, tedious work.