git clone --depth: shallow clone problems

tl: skip to the second paragraph

So here is what I just experienced: We had an emergency error in an application at work and as the responsible developer was unavailable, I was asked to check it out and look into it. We are a small branch of a bigger company and our connection to the company's source servers is really slow, so just to quickly start it up, I decided to take a shallow clone (that's what it is for, right?). After a while we realized, the clone I have made was not sufficient and was missing some newest work done on the project. I did "git fetch --unshallow" which finished surprisingly quickly, and it did not bring any newer commits. Unaware of the fine print hiding in the documentation of git clone, I blamed the repo (and in extension the person who provided me the address to it). After coming to a realization, a process which cost me time and embarrassment, I understood what is supposed to be the "correct" behaviour: "--single-branch Clone only the history leading to the tip of a single branch, either specified by the --branch option or the primary branch remote's HEAD points at. When creating a shallow clone with the --depth option, this is the default, unless --no-single-branch is given to fetch the histories near the tips of all branches." Of course, the new commits were put on a custom branch, and I knew that all the time, but I expected the branch to show up eventually, at least after git fetch --unshallow.

I hope you can see the faults in the usability of the commands I was exposed to:
1) git clone --depth  should:
   -warn about only fetching the current HEAD (name it by a real name
if applicable)
and/or
   -require the --branch option so that it is not left to chance
(current HEAD could be anything; is it really meaningful to talk about
the current HEAD on a server?)
and/or
   -make the --no-single-branch the default...
and maybe
   -have the option to clone the most recent commits.

2) git fetch --unshallow should convert the clone into an actual
equivalent of a normal, not shallow clone.

3) The documentation should be improved. The behaviour of --shallow is
described partly in the description of --no-single-branch. This is the
documentation equivalent of the infamous "come from" control flow
structure.

Regards, Michal Pomorski