You're never going to avoid all errors, but with additional tools SVN merging seems no more error prone than Git.
I do agree that source code control needs to move beyond lines to deal directly with nodes in a tree structure. That could be XML, JSON, a C++ parsed abstract syntax tree, etc.
I do agree that source code control needs to move beyond lines to deal directly with nodes in a tree structure. That could be XML, JSON, a C++ parsed abstract syntax tree, etc.