I tried to understand the benefits of DRCS. I must recognize I still doesn't get it.

Here are my current beliefs. I'm ready to destroy them thanks to your expertise. I know I'm probably resisting to change. I just want to evaluate how much that change will cost me.

• Merging hell can be solved by just applying good practices such as continuous integration.
• There is no such good practice than having a private branch for a few days when you are in a self managing team with real collaboration. I use branching for that for very rare cases, and I keep a branch for every major version, in which I fix bugs merged from the trunk.
• I see the value of committing offline then pushing online. But continuous integration can help on this too.
• I work on very large projects, and I never noticed SubVersion to be slow even when the server is 5000km away on the internet and my small connection (less than 1024D/128U).
• Harddisk space is cheap, so having a copy of source code locally doesn't look like a problem to me.
• I already have a full copy of the last version on my disk. I don't understand the distributed thing there (maybe THIS IS the key to my understanding?)
• I not new in the industry, and judging by my difficulty to understand, I don't think DRCS are easier to understand than SubVersion like. If fact, I don't understand...

Doctor, give me your diagnostic.