Did I read that correctly, they were on Subversion before this?
The community has seen some challenges with drifting apart along the way (projects isolating vs. working on common themes/initiatives), but I think this was more a side effect of overall growth than just the repo reorg. We've also since combatted it with the very successful community-wide KDE Goals election process.
We've stuck to the same ACL approach throughout, notably - you gain KDE dev rights through a peer-support process based in merit, and once you have them you can push to any repo. We mandate code review through strongly enforced social etiquette, not by ACLs.
There was no Subversion when KDE started. Like most projects of its era, KDE started with CVS, and moved to Subversion in 2005.