Branching is much, much more expensive in SVN than git (or any DVCS.) If you haven't grasped the immense value of cheap branches, nothing is going to make the inherent added complexity of DVCS (of which git has more than most, to be sure) sound good to you.
I branch at least several times a day when working on a project in git, and often throw them away quite soon afterward.
"If you haven't grasped the immense value of cheap branches..."
Why does every defense of Git seem to begin with a personal attack on the intelligence and knowledge of the critic? Trust me -- I understand the value of branches. I branch frequently in Subversion, and have never had problems (however "heavy" the branches may have been).
The primary feature of Git is distributed development, not branching.
Why does every defense of Git seem to begin with a personal attack on the intelligence and knowledge of the critic?
Because nearly every argument I've heard against Git has been stupid or just plain wrong. It isn't necessarily true that a person making a stupid argument is stupid, but it seems to be true more often than not.
I am usually aim for something a bit more civil than "you're stupid", but I've certainly thought that very loudly when reading criticisms of Git. I gave a Git talk at a local user group meeting recently. One audience member was deeply upset about "git reset" and how Git should never be used because of that feature. I thought to myself, "I guess you never use the backspace key either." (And of course said, you can easily delete commits with Subversion. svnadmin dump, edit the dump in your text editor, svnadmin load. I have done this to correct bad merges in the past -- deleting commits is much easier than living with a dumb mistake for the rest of my life.)
Anyway, I think my point is that a lot of people are afraid of anything new, and they come up with dumb arguments to convince themselves that the new thing is bad. Git is very new, and version control is a touchy subject, so a lot of bad (and ignorant) arguments come up. It is really sad, actually. When I discover a new way of thinking that makes my life easier, I don't get upset. My life has become more enjoyable... why would I not want that!?
"Because nearly every argument I've heard against Git has been stupid or just plain wrong. It isn't necessarily true that a person making a stupid argument is stupid, but it seems to be true more often than not."
When you find yourself thinking this, it's a good sign that you need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and think a little harder about your opponent's arguments.
'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.
I branch at least several times a day when working on a project in git, and often throw them away quite soon afterward.