In which universe would that be plausible. It's not in the one that I live in. The SVN developers were always fairly candid and open about the fact that they think, that SVN is the tool they want to build, but that their priorities do not align with every other project under this sun. That is, unlike Linux, who promotes git as the superior and end-of-it-all VCS, the SVN people publicly state that they're building a system that adopted certain tradeoffs that may make it unsuitable for some kind of project - especially for the linux kernel. [1] Even though I dropped SVN and adopted git for the large majority of my projects, I still see the occasional project that would be served much better by using a stupid, centralized VCS such as SVN and I'm happy that SVN exists and continues to thrive.

[1] http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html