Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn't specify your sample size and I won't vouch for what people I don't know tell you. You can take it as whatever you'd like. Next you'll be saying the Django tutorial is the standard way to lay out projects. It's in the documentation, right?
Well, of the people who decided to provide answers on HN or reddit, the consensus was: merge the branch, delete it, then add a tag on the merge commit. And then on IRC the author of this book told me to do the same thing: http://pragprog.com/titles/tsgit/pragmatic-version-control-u... The only person who suggested anything else, out of fifty-seven comments so far, was one who suggested merging the branch and then kee…
Conventions are just conventions anyway. We've established that there's no technical barrier to your two objections. 1) You can clone different branches into different paths, which is exactly like a traditional svn workflow, and a pretty normal thing to do for continuous integrations and the like. 2) And if you never want to delete a branch, you can check on their merged status to determine if they're "done". More clever solutions have been supplied by others in this thread. You needn't convert to git, but it'd be polite to recognize that your objection to git is purely psychological.