I agree re format vs tool complexity. I don't think Jupyter is a particularly difficult format though, its mostly light JSON -- all human-readable.
We realised after working with Jupyter+Git for a while that the pain-points were actually with Jupyter editors (and/or their conventions) rather than the format, because they do things like store user-metadata in the file which pollutes diffs and leads to merge conflicts.
In fact, if Jupyter editors could handle merge conflicted files, we wouldn't need a custom merge driver either.
We realised after working with Jupyter+Git for a while that the pain-points were actually with Jupyter editors (and/or their conventions) rather than the format, because they do things like store user-metadata in the file which pollutes diffs and leads to merge conflicts.
In fact, if Jupyter editors could handle merge conflicted files, we wouldn't need a custom merge driver either.