If you're forced to use crappy STM, you can still make "stealth" uses of a better SCM in your private workflows.

I have stories also. In one company almost twenty years ago, some Java-spewing troglodytes went on a branch and did stupid things, like simultaneously rename A.java to B.java, B.java to C.java and C.java to A.java! While of course changing all their content too.

When it came time to merge, this was completely beyond the power of Subversion to sort out.

They came to me for help, and I whipped out my Meta-CVS, with excellent support not only for renaming but for doing snapshot imports which figure out renaming by file similarity. We imported all the baselines into it, and it did the merge flawlessly across the rotated renames.

We took the resulting merged baseline out of Meta-CVS and cleanly committed it to the Subversion trunk.

Don't discount other SCMs being useful as tools in SCM problems, even if they are not the main source-of-truth SCM used by the org.