We tried this exact formula at a place I worked previously and we had mostly the same results. It didn't help that the guy in your position didn't know the code

We tried this exact formula at a place I worked previously and we had mostly the same results. It didn't help that the guy in your position didn't know the codebase or Subversion very well either. It was/is terribly painful and indicative of brain-dead managers and along with a few other (admittedly more important) things eventually led me to quit. The most frustrating aspect was it seems that, while far from perfect, using Subversion as intended, in your case and ours, would be 1/10th as painful even while introducing a few issues of its own. The explanation I always got was "long before you came on board we used Perforce but we switched to Subversion because it's open source but we still want to use it like it's Perforce." You seem to have reasoned about your change quite a bit more than this, so I'm interested in hearing why you think you need to do things this way.