Git has been "flavour of the month" for 3 years now. ;)

I'd like to actually read stories of people who willingly went back. Could you link them?

As for why SVN is hard to use, just a few points: It's a lot of hard work to separate whitespace-change commits from actual content commits if you end up having both after a hard day of hacking. Its merge logic is completely inept in dealing with complex things, for example it regards two identical changes to the same thing in different branches as a conflict when merging. It is impossible to fix something in a set of commits if you realize it after the fact, because committing means publishing; in Git you can fix history BEFORE it has become history.

Also, here's what is bad about a central repository: You have no fine access control. All you can do is give a person access to read or write and that's that. If you want to look at their changes before adding them to your body of code, you can only allow them to get the code, do their changes, and then send you an email with a diff. They basically cannot work with the tools a vcs gives them (history, granular change sets, backup).

In git they can just branch off your repo, work with it in their own repo. Meanwhile in your own repo theirs can be added as a branch from which you can read at any time. It's like being able to give people their own branch(set) in which they can read/write, while you completely retain control over your own branches.

This is useful in both small teams as well as a MASSIVE boon for large teams, who can set up any sort of hierarchy structure they like, because every single checkout is a fully qualified repository that can be read or written to by anyone with the rights to do so.