'Grasped the immense value of...' isn't any more of a personal attack than 'apparently a lot of git users haven't heard...' :) Branches (in the sense of SVN, p

'Grasped the immense value of...' isn't any more of a personal attack than 'apparently a lot of git users haven't heard...' :) Branches (in the sense of SVN, p4, etc) are a subset of the functionality that distributed development entails (local history, cheap copy operations, fast merge, etc). You can get a ton of mileage out of git, hg, etc without any distributed collaborators. The point remains, branching in SVN is much more expensive. There's no comparison.