The fact that it was easy to clone a subdirectory was nice; the fact that branches were just subdirectories also was not nice. The fact that tags were mutable since they were also just subdirectories... the fact that every operation you ever did required going to the server (commit, log, checkout, everything) made it a pain if you were on a slow link.
I can't count the number of times I was inspecting SVN history and had to just 'svn log > /tmp/svn.log' so I would have the whole log locally rather than having to hit the server each time I wanted to refine a grep.
SVN was actually quite decent for game development, definitely more robust and (non-technical-) user-friendly than git+lfs.
(and SVN isn't really compatible with the work-from-home era unfortunately, you really needed a big server on a gigabit LAN)
Thats not how everyone else works.
We're all using package managers to help with massive amounts of 3rd party dependancies (why are you version pinning in any place other than your repo, why arent you pulling updates through your repo and reviewing them)
We're reliant on tools like artifactory to make sure those depedancys dont disappear or are not corrupted.
We use yet other tools to manage our binary files (this tool would fix that).
Github, gittea, gitlab, bitbucket... have all added piles of tooling around git, that are grafted on around its short comings.
> It's crazy to me that nobody has made anything better yet.
Because our entire industry has fallen into the rut of "more tools", of stacking turtles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down ) rather than fixing the real issues that hold us back.
> Although I could start that myself and yet have not.
Because unless your a Google or a Linus, no one is going to look twice at your tool for something that is this important. Im not even sure that epic games has the good will, or trust to launch this.
I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and take a long hard look at it, but my optimism is tempered. But unless it offers a LOT more than git, the extra overhead (lacking IDE support, deployment changes and all the other tooling in GIT's orbit) it isnt going to be a worth while change.
This is why I'm not motivated to build something better. I don't think anyone would care.