I think the big big points for git initially actually were: 1) performance - everything comparable but open was way slower back then 2) a usable and relatively small per-checkout history

In the cvs & svn days I used a fair amount of hacks to get those two, and pretty much always failed. For svn svk was a partial solution. For cvs there was rsync, but also something else I can't even remember. Bad memories fade.