But git has a very slightly improved merge algorithm than svn (so they say) — but merge conflicts were less painful and less likely to happen on svn.

The only real advantage git has is bandwidth and disk space —- not that it uses bandwidth and disk space more efficiently —- only that we all have more of both, so it seems more useful than subversion (or whatever else you were using before) when you had limited disk space so you didn’t pass around infinite copies of everything.