| That said, I don't think that using Subversion as an intermediate step for a
| few years would have helped that much.
Remember that a big chunk of the conversion was in the support infrastructure. Having to revamp the buildfarm etc. infrastructure twice wouldn't have helped.
(I don't know the situation in the pg universe, but in Debian, quite a few administrators of support infrastructure are not intimately involved in development, so they may not see the ideas behind a change that means quite a lot of work to them...)