3.5 You are not using a version control system that makes branching and merging a pain.

Branching is easy. It's so easy it's trivial. It's so trivial it's less work to branch than it is to drill down to a particular file and open it.

``But K.,'' (that's me) you say, ``branching and merging is a pain.''

No. It's just a pain in that lame ass VCS you're using now. Move on.

If you keep using something which makes you want to avoid branching you'll eventually give up and go back to just doing all your work in development. And you are not a dork. You are going to start doing things right and than means setting yourself up with tools that do what you need them to do in such a way that you don't mind actually doing it.