SVN was more straightforward to use, but that straightforwardness lost a lot in terms of fidelity.

The fact that it was easy to clone a subdirectory was nice; the fact that branches were just subdirectories also was not nice. The fact that tags were mutable since they were also just subdirectories... the fact that every operation you ever did required going to the server (commit, log, checkout, everything) made it a pain if you were on a slow link.

I can't count the number of times I was inspecting SVN history and had to just 'svn log > /tmp/svn.log' so I would have the whole log locally rather than having to hit the server each time I wanted to refine a grep.

We are legion ;)

SVN was actually quite decent for game development, definitely more robust and (non-technical-) user-friendly than git+lfs.

(and SVN isn't really compatible with the work-from-home era unfortunately, you really needed a big server on a gigabit LAN)