It is not just about being harder to understand. I would say it is partially self contradicting. First, it teaches you to unlearn the centralized vc. But i am yet to see a commercial git repo which doesn't maintain a central branch. The amount of confusion it puts an average developer into, specially if they are coming from subversion background does eat a lot of energy. I bet the person making the decision to switch to git, didn't foresee that (i didn't). Otherwise, you always would question if it is worth the trouble maintaining the project. Having said that, although there are countless benefits of git, but the one that truly makes it worthwhile in my scenario was the difference in merging capability. SVN needs to go a really long way even to be competitive there.