Calm down. :) I never said that subversion's interface is great(?!), I just said that designers often find some tools programmers use ridiculously ugly and unnecessarily complicated. I think they have a valid point, and when programmers write them off, they often lose valuable feedback. (If a relatively simple tool is as annoying to configure as procmail, for example, somebody screwed up badly. IMHO.)
I use Mercurial, but I don't have any grand illusions about its interface being ideal. It works well enough for me, though. (I don't like svn either; tracking changes on a file-by-file basis isn't usually the right abstraction for the way I work.) DCVSs are relatively new, as somebody else pointed out, and in time they will probably have better interfaces.
designers often find some tools programmers use ridiculously ugly and unnecessarily complicated
Yeah, that must be why so many of them use no version control at all...
I agree that the VCS to use is the one that your designer is willing to use. I just think that there's no reason why designers should necessarily want to use Subversion over a DVCS... except that, as a more mature tool, Subversion has a better selection of interface alternatives and a larger installed base.
I use Mercurial, but I don't have any grand illusions about its interface being ideal. It works well enough for me, though. (I don't like svn either; tracking changes on a file-by-file basis isn't usually the right abstraction for the way I work.) DCVSs are relatively new, as somebody else pointed out, and in time they will probably have better interfaces.