And to repeat, I really am willing to pay money to go back to SVN.
I'm going to stick my two giant boots into this conversation. Because I've written bzr gui tools and because I've committed to inkscape using the branch method in the past few months.
Over at http://ground-control.org/ I have attempted to make a tool which very closely follows a clean 'best' workflow when working with bzr. You can watch the videos. I even tested it a few times with the inkscape branch, which does take an age to download.
But bzr has a few neat tricks. One is that you can specify a cache directory when you do your checkout. This sets up a .bzr directory in the specified path where it will cache and link your checkouts together. If you checkout inkscape over here and then checkout a branch for modification over there, it'll only download any of the differences between them for your new branch.
This is enabled by default in GroundControl for obvious reasons. Thanks goes out to a bzr developer who took it upon himself to add the code in himself in a branch in the early days.
I think developers are really hard to deal with when it comes to try and serve them tools. They all know how they work and when you do something revolutionary or different they want to take your eyes out with a spoon for making their lives harder. Bzr and Git are a new and different way to manage code that produces more usable workflows than SVN. You just have to be aware of those workflows before you get angry at the tools.
If any of you are _serious_ about trying to improve the ability to use gui tools with bzr and launchpad on gnome. Please help me with GroundControl, I need more developers to go over code (make sure it's not crazy) and add in the features they want to see. Watch the videos on the website linked above, it's really very easy to contribute.
Regards, Martin Owens