"Wait. You were going to ditch subversion for git because of 16 second branch merge times?"

Performance matters.

Over time that adds up when your coding consists of REPL like workflow.

Pulling out Instagram 100 times in every workday, yes, it's a total disaster

16 seconds is infuriating for something that needs to be manually tested like does this jump feel too floaty.

But it’s also probable that 16 seconds was fairly early in development and it would get much worse from there.