> Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward.

That may be true (honestly, I don't know), but I haven't yet needed to maintain different branches of projects I'm working on and so it's a non-issue at this point. If at some point it becomes an issue, and I find Mercurial lacking, then of course I'll take a closer look at git, who probably does it more appropriately.

It's a good idea to make a branch for each release. Then you can easily look at the code that's in production and make patches.

Mercurial also has cheap local branching, though to my understanding it is easier to close out branches that have been merged back in / abandoned on git. The mercurial developers are working on this, though.