The merge tracking that was tacked onto svn just isn’t reliable. Adding it as metadata isn’t a good enough solution. Shared medium/long lived branches such as version maintenance branches or shared dev branches invariably get merges “both ways” meaning the information of what’s merged where is sprinkled everywhere.

But I’d go even further and say: svn isn’t even a good choice for a basic feature branch workflow. Not that it’s impossible, but the added “convenience” of svn is much smaller than the gains of git.

I don’t think the “D” in dvcs is important. As you point out, most people use git with a blessed central repo because that’s what we want.