My perspective is that having carefully picked verbs that are clear in their meaning, and different from each other, will help the command line interface be intuitive and easy to use. I would like to be able to type in a command, and if I type the command incorrectly, have a helpful error message based on what I was perhaps trying to do, and also have a command that I can type into a search engine and get meaningful help.
I believe this is something that darcs worked on, and it is one of the things that attracted me to that project. I do not believe that the same verbs must be used as darcs uses, nor the same as git, nor any other tool. If different verbs are chosen, my preference would be for them to be more clear in their meaning than the original, if possible. Having the verbs used by pijul be different from each other (different concepts or meanings), I think would also clarify what each is used for, so there would be less times that a command was attempted to be used for something it does not do.