It would be interesting to know more about the pain points of Subversion and if you found that Mercurial improved on those or not. The text mentions "we wanted

It would be interesting to know more about the pain points of Subversion and if you found that Mercurial improved on those or not. The text mentions "we wanted something better, specifically something that would support branching and merging", which is very strange since Subversion not only has very easy to use branching and merging but it is also quite lightweight compared to most other systems, with the exception of git and hg (which has a different architecture altogether).