It might be helpful if you could spell out why the branching, tagging and merging of svn isn't workable for you. It's clearly worked for many people and large projects for a number of years.
Linus didn't set out to create git because of some missing features in svn, but because he wanted a fundamentally different tool. If you find yourself with merges that are clean in version control system but creates conflicts in another, which is entirely possible, you are likely doing something very special that isn't a great fit for either.
There might be more straightforward process to follow that doesn't end up with such difficult merges. Maybe it's just merging more often, maybe it's something else. But it's very easy to blame the tools when the processes are broken.
