An obvious area for improvement would be semantic version control. If the VCS would have an understanding of not only what has changed but also how this affect

An obvious area for improvement would be semantic version control. If the VCS would have an understanding of not only what has changed but also how this affects the code, it could deduce a lot if interesting facts about commit blocks. Like ignoring simple refactorings (e.g. renamings), reducing merge conflicts, etc.