Subversion pre-1.5 was a nightmare. Branch merges were by convention in commit messages. To merge 20 commits from your branch, you would do `svn merge -r 125:140 /branches/my-feature` and then note in the commit message which range you merged.

1.5 made that tracking automatic but just shoved it into a metadata field that just percolated through every directory in a project.

And if someone tried to rename a core path? In the distance, sirens.

You're right about SVN's guts vs Git. I should have been clearer that I was referring to the client cli only.

I found that doing anything even slightly unusual in Git was pretty incomprehensible until I learned its internals, and pretty easy once I did. Fortunately as you say the internals are conceptually pretty simple to learn.