But why not use a mechanism that already exists - local commits. That way you also get a complete history of changes (including rollbacks), can write incremental commit messages, and can squash everything partially or completely at the end.
I made myself a few alias to use this approach. After a few months of use I can say staging is practically unnecessary for me. There were a few edge cases, but maybe I was just falling back to known solutions. I'm in favor of dropping staging.
