For GP's use case, its "added some stuff, want to stage the stuff I modified since then to those files"... which I feel is a perfectly normal workflow.

There's nothing saying that one can't add chunks to the staging area and then immediately commit it without invoking that alias afterwards (since it is a very deliberate "add these things" rather than "adding a bunch of things and keep adding."

> git add -p

git commit -p achieves the same, but avoids explicitly using the staging area.