Did you miss the part where I said I'd like to not involve the VCS tool? Without using git, how do I see two different branches' versions of files?

So never delete branches. You'll know if they're "done" if they've been merged into your master branch.

But nobody else will. What everybody and their brother has told me to do is delete the branch and invent an ad-hoc naming scheme to tag the merge commits. Which is... um, no, that's not the same as being able to close a branch.

You could clone the branches to different paths, I guess.

But nobody else will [know that a branch is "done".]

If you've instructed the team to care about merged status, they will. And there's nothing semantically strange about it either.

I get it, git isn't for you. I concede.