Right, there was a golden age of interesting DVCSs around then - Darcs (2003), Monotone (2003), Bazaar (2005), Git (2005), Mercurial (2005), Fossil (2006).
It's not just the big name -- Linus learned from the mistakes of the older DVCSs. I also used to use Arch a bit. Git was a vast improvement (eg. it didn't force you to use long ugly branch names).
I use Arch (2006) btw.