core-git and porcelains

I'm a newcomer to git, and for the last few days, I've been struggling to learn how to better use git in my day to day. One particular thing that has been puzzling me is how much git is self-sufficient, and how much I should depend on porcelains.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/6194/focus=6194

The above post was made about three months ago; where things stand now? Do you feel that git-core should suffice for most developers, or should I really look into something like Cogito?

Depending on the project, my git usage would fit one of two profiles. I run some standalone projects, where I'm the sole developer. I was looking into using cogito for this scenario, but one thing that baffled me is how git-core and cogito use different branch representations.

For the larger part of my day, however, I'm looking into using git as a personal tool in a very large corporate project; This project is currently controlled using subversion, and my idea is to use git as a 'staging' system, where I work (possibly offline) before pushing changes to the upstream (remote, slow as hell) subversion repository. Here, git-svn seems to be my best friend.

Any advice to this poor newbie?

-- Marcus