ClearCase Considered Harmful

I'm a big fan of Configuration Management, and I am a long-time user of CVS and short-time user of Subversion. My current project uses ClearCase, which is often considered to be the leading product in the industry. Initially, I was very excited to use ClearCase, because it is [supposedly] designed with the software development process in mind -- especially when using the Unified Configuration Management model. This is in contrast to CVS and Subversion which does not force users to work in any particular way; note that this is often cited as a deficiency of CVS / Subversion.

First the good, ClearCase :

• is very good at merging changes or at least, I think it is -- I was warned off branches (activities in UCM ClearCase)
  
• can show you, continuously, what the combination of arbitrary streams of development would look like (say, a development branch and a release branch)

Now the bad, ClearCase:

• sometimes decides not to write changes to certain files to disk, so even though changes are hitting the filesystem in some files, they aren't in others. i.e., your editor sees one thing, your compiler and unit tests another. Get set to reboot and rewrite!
  
• will not let you make any change to any file that is not checked out; this doesn't sound too bad at first, but think about how many times you just want to crack open a file and put a couple of print statements in it to figure out if you need to change it. This also inhibits refactoring.
  
• is slow to perform common operations (checkout, refresh) and fast to perform uncommon ones (baseline, graph history)
• has many separate user interfaces for no particular reason, as far as I can tell. There's no equivalent of WinCVS or TortoiseSVN. Note, I'd probably rather be using the command-line interface (cleartool), anyway, but I am having such a difficult time grasping it (see next point) that I'm afraid to try it. In particular, the UI presented by the IBM Rational Software Development Platform, which is based on Eclipse, is abysmal. I actually find the ClearCase plugin for NetBeans far more usable, which is pretty amazing considering that the Rational SDP is a product sold / bundled by IBM and the NetBeans plugin isn't.
  
• causes everyone around to disavow any knowledge of it -- maybe some people do know it and just don't want to share because they're busy, but I doubt it. Nobody seems to get ClearCase and all mumble about using something easier.
  

In the end, I think ClearCase is too sophisticated for its own good, even when using the simplified UCM model, especially for small teams. It's clear to me that I'm probably not going to get much better at ClearCase without some training by an experienced user. I've already got one of the best books available for ClearCase and it's not helping.

I think I might just set up a Subversion repository, do all my work there, and check it into ClearCase when I'm done. I'd probably have a net time savings after the first 3 days of use.