Terms like "preferred" an "harder to read" are subjective. Whenever I'm on a notebook (which turns out to be most of the time), I prefer the unified view.

If your argument is that it's too much work, I won't argue with that, but If you think it not worth doing because noone will find it useful, I beg to differ. The most popular source control website defaults to the unified view, and many users might find it easier to read as it is the view they are used to.

I think we have a nomenclature misunderstanding (sorry), I meant, the "changes" window in SmartGit.

Basically, the option to switch like this https://github.com/blog/1884-introducing-split-diffs