Branching was a pain for me when using SVN - far too much hassle to keep on top of it all; All branches are visible to everyone and merging between them was slow.

With Git, branching is simple and really fast. It can also be done in such a way as to prevent your own personal development and feature branches from making it back into the central repo.

I've also found that cherry picking commits between branches and squishing small commits help me maintain the cleanliness of our repos (At no point in the history of our central repo is there half of a new feature or fix).