Thank you for investigating further and submitting the bug report; although, I am not sure how the change you suggested could be made. Git simply does not have the concept of checking out files. But then Git is also not really built to work with binary data so choosing to use Git for assets will come with extra responsibilities for the user.
But this all misses the point of the issue I was trying to raise. If the behavior is the intended functionality then, in my opinion, the intention is wrong. Why is changing the content of a file when, as far as the user is concerned, the asset has not changed intentional? The crux of your responses is that “Perforce helps protect against the Unreal Editor changing your data.” And “Oh, Git doesn’t help protect against the Unreal Editor changing your data. That is a bug in Git.” My response is “If the Unreal Editor didn’t change my data when I didn’t tell it to, I wouldn’t have to rely on source control to protect me.”
If you define a bug as a case where the software doesn’t behave as it was designed, then this is not a bug. If you define it as a case where the software doesn’t behave as it should, then this is a bug.
I don’t really expect a response but I would appreciate it if you could bring the issue up with a group that can do something about it. This is really a matter of design philosophy. Your engineers need to ask “what IS an asset?” and only store that in the file that represents an asset. I ran into a similar problem yesterday when I discovered that setting a breakpoint in a blueprint modifies the file. Why? Different versions in source control should only represent real changes to a file. I shouldn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make sure that is the case because the Unreal Editor is cavalier in its attitude towards changing the content of files. This is important because it has a huge impact on usability and productivity.