i used to use them extensively. unless something has radically changed, they cost nothing in the svn repository but when you pull them down, you have multiple copies on disk which takes double the space because of the way a branch appears like a separate folder in your working copy. am i missing something?

sorry but that is a very long time. Branching is something I do dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day (creating, checking out, deleting, etc).

svn doesn't fit the sane modern workflow and everything it does can be done by git in a less painful manner. I think the only use case I can think of for svn is a very binary heavy repo that needs global locking.

I worked in an environment with a significantly larger repository, and svn switches were a constant source of frustration.