feature branches are awesome. My problem is usually in early protoyping, where I want to push my stuff somewhere, but often switch paradigms.

I.e. I just started learning Rails, building a new app from scratch, and you can imagine it becoming messsy. Before I get confident in a certain architecture, I would just push to master all the time with "some more blah" messages.

I think rebasing can be valuable in this sense, since it will destroy crappy history. I'm more found of the git flow workflow in a team development effort, expecially if your thingy is already in a production pipeline. I've found rebasing to be often very confusing and destructive, while merges are clear and easy to manage.