Significantly. AFAIK there are still pathological cases where it'd take much time, but they are very rare.
[And to be fair: others don't have that problem only because their merging doesn't take into account the history.]
[And to be fair: others don't have that problem only because their merging doesn't take into account the history.]
Now that I'm picking your brain anyway, do you know if there's any (workable) way at all to combine a site like GitHub or Bitbucket with Darcs?