I feel like if we were to switch to a per-developer system we would end up with something similar to what you described in your last paragraph. But it would develop organically after the system is setup. So by the time we notice that we're back to a per-feature system it'll be too late to change back.....

We ARE using Git, the main reason why I'm dealing with this issue is that someone was tasked to merge different branches and they almost merged incorrect branches because of the similarities in their names. Management was quite displeased after that incident