> Perforce checkout requests always do the round trip to the server

That's literally the antithesis of Git. If that's a requirement, then yeah - Git's the wrong thing.

It's like complaining that bicycles don't have motors like motorcycles. If it had a motor, it wouldn't be a bicycle.

The question as I recall was what Perforce does that Git LFS doesn't, so I'm sorry to disappoint but my hands were tied.

Anyway, I dunno, man. If you want binary files to work, some form of per-file mutex is indeed a requirement. And for this to work well, without being a lot of hassle (and regarding that, see point 2, which I note has been accepted without comment - not that I expected anything else, the argument that Git is the artist-friendly choice would be a difficult one to make), any modification of the mutex's state has to involve a round trip to ensure the info is up to date. You can't rely on something local, that only gets updated sometimes, because then the info can be out of date! Worst case, N people find out too late that they've all been making changes simultaneously, and now N-1 of them will almost certainly lose work.

(You might be inclined to moan at people for not going through the full process, but: we have computers now! They can do the full process for us!)