Yeah it leave a bad taste in my mouth too. I'm not sure its a good idea to have a better experience for people who are using github as the git server. Its contrary to the philosophy of the project. Maybe I should just pull the feature until it can be supported no matter the git server. why is git clone inefficent? to display a readme we need to download potentially thousands of commits and (I think) all the files present in the tip of the master branch. with `git archive --remote <url>` we just download a tar compressed readme.