I used to work with SVN in a group of 3 developers and several branches (test, staging, master) and it was pretty messy. When I read the original comment about

I used to work with SVN in a group of 3 developers and several branches (test, staging, master) and it was pretty messy. When I read the original comment about bug fixes disappearing, it reminded me of merging test onto stable by hand, not knowing what was "the good code" and having to ask, research, etc. It was messy and some times we got regressions. We called this thing, a bug fix got "merged away". Nowadays with Git, feature branches, better test coverage, continuous integration; things have got much better.