SVN: false promises

I've had to do a massive project refactoring. To be more specific, I had to split Hibernate Annotations in several pieces and make Hibernate Validator and Hibernate Search independent projects (stay tuned). Of course, I wanted to keep track of my changes history.
Supposedly, SVN is greater than CVS in this area, it can keep track of object renaming and copying without loosing tracks.

I've never had such troubles in a long time. A few tricks:
- IntelliJ package renaming is great but don't try to do too much in one commit: nothing is more annoying than a cryptic version control error after a complex refactoring.
- svn move of complex structure does not seems to work properly in local move: prefer using the svn move url1 url2. For the record, SVN ended up moving part of my tree without any complaints :-(
- don't expect to update a directory and move/rename it, SVN will actually prevent you to do so (at least the complex one I had)

So I ended up branching, committing my package renaming, doing server side svn move of my packages around the different projects. I wish I could have done that in an atomic way with no branching.

I'm not a SVN expert, but I usually don't expect my tools to require a PhD in version control, and a driver license to use them. There are huge rooms for improvements here. Think users :-)

For me SVN is not really better than CVS (except the local diff/revert).