[zbuf]

I did consider that in my reply. But then the poster is really getting to grips with branching, and so I didn't feel the tool was the weakness here.

However, it's worth considering if subversion is actually what you need (I haven't used Perforce but I have heard its underlying structure is conceptually similar?) I saw sysadmins struggling with Git when all they needed was to enforce good use of a single branch, and central repository and some history. They felt they should be using Git, and in doing so threw away a tool that was already a good match to their workflow.