Conventions are just conventions anyway.  We've established that there's no technical barrier to your two objections.  1) You can clone different branches into different paths, which is exactly like a traditional svn workflow, and a pretty normal thing to do for continuous integrations and the like.  2) And if you never want to delete a branch, you can check on their merged status to determine if they're "done".  More clever solutions have been supplied by others in this thread.  You needn't convert to git, but it'd be polite to recognize that your objection to git is purely psychological.