> it makes branches cheap and easy.

IMHO branching itself isn't expensive in Subversion, the problems arise when you merge (feature)branches back. If you branch off (for release branches) and then just selectively merge certain commits to that branch only if needed (the info being stored in svn:mergeinfo), I think its not that bad. I prefer branch-by-abstraction and trunk-based dev anyway, so here you go ;)