There are many situations where branches are the standard, conventional way of doings things: release managements, legacy development. Making branch hard does n

There are many situations where branches are the standard, conventional way of doings things: release managements, legacy development. Making branch hard does not make much sense - svn (with maybe cvs) are the only systems which make branch almost unusable. Every other system (including proprietary, non distributed ones) handle branch correctly. Git made popular the use of branches for almost everything, but branches have been used way before DVCS became popular. It just happened to be that besides cvs/svn, all the non peculiar open source systems are DVCS, but working merge caps and branch managements are not specific to DVCS (but DVCS would be unusable without it).