There are a few free/cheap version control systems out there for PSDs.
Pixelnovel timeline is reasonably good, although currently their storage plans are quite small. Adobe's own version cue server (which they annoyingly discontinued) is pretty usable as well.
Hopefully the Adobe Drive stuff they've recently rolled out will end up integrated into one of the big (D)VCS's, so we can finally start managing digital assets as easily as code.
I don't think that you're ever going to get the dev community to force format changes on Adobe, because the chances or someone really building a solid competitor that you'd need to pass files back and forth from are so low.
Version control systems oriented toward "creative" are very visual and expensive (like alienbrain) primarily due to the fact that the cost of adding proprietary format parsing capability. And you will not be able to convince the vast majority of designers to use Gimp or inkscape.
I would say that the web developer community needs to promote use of open formats for design composition, perhaps if we can get rid of AI and PSD as standard compositional formats we will make some progress, it is starting to work with Flash.