Hendrik:
A lot of file formats, especially those used by artists, are hostile to the essential 'merge' operation in version control.
A lapse on my part. I didn't think of that when I was typing that whole thing up. That makes it quite a bit difficult, as multiple forks can't be merged and one simply has to decide between them, then, if worthwhile, refactor the new version to include the merits of other forks. Okay, maybe not possible for 100+ collaborators xD
On the bright side, it appears to be a problem that's been tackled before for blender: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?344037-Addon-Blender-Git-Ver...
It would be interesting if there might be a way to convert blend files to python, since blender has heavy support of its python api.
This problem appears to have been solved for gimp, under the radar: https://sites.google.com/site/httimchen/2011_imagesvn
Luke:
the second, hendrik, you may have misunderstood why "art" was mentioned in the context of science and engineering. we are *not* discussing "traditional artistic subjects" such as painting, sculpting and so on.
we are referring to (as does the hippocratic oath) the application of artistic *principles* to scientific endeavour, which is something that is, admittedly, quite hard to understand let alone actually do.
Naw, one of my tings definitely did mention CVS of art assets somewhere in dat confuddled mess xd