Versioning is a git
I saw this video a while back, and to be honest, it made me avoid subversion.
I have gone from CVS to git. They just seemed a bit too oiley and arrogant over the whole matter. That guy could have forked subversion had he really cared, and a date parser is a real minor issue to make this mountain of mole hill over.
Truth be told most open source projects are written by small teams of people, some seem to like making up their own rules to fit in with what makes a good project for them, it happens all over. It is a small minded to apply the term poisonous to anyone disagreeing, and then going off lecturing about it really.
Subversion, heh, just another versioning system to have installed to get at source code, git stole it's thunder a while back, and CVS was workable at Subversion's zenith, I think they may just be a bitter over it all.