That sentiment comprises a truly mindblowing number of "bug" reports that hit the Mercurial mailing list every month. I honestly wonder sometimes if I'm simply forgetting how CVS users did the same thing when Subversion shipped and I forgot about it/missed it, or what.

svn was designed to be "CVS done right," which informed a lot of the design and workflow to the point that some CVS misfeatures only got carried through by virtue of that mandate.

(Source of this assertion is prolonged discussions with sussman, one of the early svn authors.)

Not exactly, but close. Switching away from Git would require a tool that is both compellingly better in some key way as well as not worse for any existing workflow. I have yet to see any other version control system that meets both of those criteria, even leaving aside the network effects of using the most popular system.