I've done surgery on svn repos to unhose things a few times over the years, usually due to PEBCAK rather than svn shitting itself. It's actually pretty doable, up to and including the equivalent of interactive rebase.
I much prefer that git's designed to let me do such things and provides tools for doing so, but you can totally rewire svn repos with vi and a bunch of swearing if necessary.
(and I was using svk for a merge tool at the time so I did have the option to burn it down and rebuild from scratch; unhosing svn repos wasn't quite unpleasant enough for me to want to do so)
Then again, I started off doing more ops than dev and have also happily hand-edited mysql replication logs to unfuck things after a partial failover, so I may have more of a masochistic streak than you do :)
I much prefer that git's designed to let me do such things and provides tools for doing so, but you can totally rewire svn repos with vi and a bunch of swearing if necessary.
(and I was using svk for a merge tool at the time so I did have the option to burn it down and rebuild from scratch; unhosing svn repos wasn't quite unpleasant enough for me to want to do so)
Then again, I started off doing more ops than dev and have also happily hand-edited mysql replication logs to unfuck things after a partial failover, so I may have more of a masochistic streak than you do :)