YES! Agree on every single point!
I've been wanting this for several years, and have brought it up multiple times. I don't really know why it hasn't happened yet, but recently there has been more support. I still have hope we'll switch to git eventually.
I remember discussing it with Philip awhile back. He wasn't really against moving to git, but felt (at the time) that the migration effort was significant, and that svn was good enough for smaller projects. The project has grown a bit since then though.
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From conventions I've seen, it's generally "master" and "dev" for very stable and mostly stable respectively, with various other release, feature, and bugfix branches.