Astoria has never caused trouble for me..not once have I been refused, and I cab it back to 23av/31st a couple of times a week from lower manhattan. Maybe it's all of the tlc-oriented services along 21st that make it less of a hassle?
I've been using it daily for over three years on cygwin. If you don't depend on case-sensitive paths and don't have symlinks in your repository, it's great. I use it for work and for personal stuff, and I have zero desire to find a new tool.
Git is, given its heritage, heavily optimized for unix-style (especially linux) vfs implementations, so it is slower on windows than it is on osx or linux, however even with a fairly sizeable repository it's completely usable. It's not noticeably slower than the alternatives on windows and it's generally much faster on unix.
There is a much more selfish, and imo, effective solution to this.
Instead of looking down or focusing much on what other people around you are doing, look up and away from the direction you're walking and walk quickly and confidently. I usually focus on the 4th or 5th floor of the buildings across the street. There's still enough awareness via peripheral vision to avoid colliding with people, and that's the only thing you need to worry about.
The other humans will be subconsciously aware of the direction your eyes are pointing and be fooled into thinking that you can't see them and are about to run into them. They will basically be forced to move out of the way.
Since I discovered this technique a few years ago, I've used it hundreds of times. So long as there's some foot traffic flowing in both directions, you can always get into the oncoming traffic lane of the sidewalk and use this method to make people scatter out of your way.
If you don't think hacking is appropriate, then learn the business side. If you can take a bunch of hackers with a good idea and figure out how to turn that into a business and money then you shouldn't have much of a problem. Any coding types worth working with will know that there are "business-y things" that they're better off not doing and will eventually wish they had someone to pick that stuff up.
