Why were you surprised? 1,000+ person organization on subversion is non-trivial. Is there a compelling reason to move? Do you really need the D in DVCS if yo

Why were you surprised? 1,000+ person organization on subversion is non-trivial. Is there a compelling reason to move? Do you really need the D in DVCS if you're not really distributed? But to address your question: my experience moving from Subversion to a DVCS for an organization that's sizable enough to be similar is that Mercurial provides a much shorter path to being basically operational, but that's not saying much. I don't think the web has decided that Git is the clear winner. You're probably onto something about your engineering team, though. In an org of that size, it's quite likely that the complexity of DVCS will be out o grasp of quite a number of them, so you should definitely be sure that the switch won't totally undermine your operation. Also consider the training. Even if hg syntax is similar svn, it's a fundamentally different thing. If you're really using DVCS for all it's worth, you're probably not going to be on premises with every engineer to facilitate training, so you'll either be flying all over to help them or they're going to need to be able to do it themselves. If you're not absolutely committed, don't move. If you are committed to switch, you can piggyback on Subversion knowledge to get to an okay place with Mercurial. Git certainly won't make it simpler, but it almost doesn't even matter, so if you prefer it and you're leading, you might as well go with your preference.