The elephant in the room with SVN was that merging two branches repeatedly was fraught with errors that just seemed to grow quadratically. It was part of why we were on the verge of assigning dedicated maintainers for each release branch so that people only had to recall how the code works now and on their release.

I think people see rebasing as a way to subtract from N. If you have another way that everyone can be trusted to handle 3+ way merges handily and unconfusingly, then it’s a matter of retraining people.

If not, well...