That behaviour issue is addressible - in some orgs.
Get people in the habit of proactively updating at least daily.
Same issue. Daily window of multiple files vs. typically an hour window or so for a single file.
And if you choose not to do this you mainly create problems for yourself.
No, you create issues for the entire group as multiple files need to be reconciled before the project can be built.
For porting, create a branch and then run a command to detect conflicts every day.
Not feasible. I would have detected dozens of conflicts each day.
Similarly if you suspect that developers are not keeping good habits, you can run a cron job to find conflicts so you can come by and give them the speesh.
Easier said than done, and not in keeping with the culture we have here.
Many groups make it work for them.
Perhaps. Perhaps many groups make it work for them because they don't know any better. Not many groups have a code base consisting of 2M lines of code and 70 very active developers. Even large open source projects don't have the same level of activity that we do; people are working on this code base all day long for 8-12 hours a day. As a comparison, this is about twice as many loc as the gcc 3.2.1 C++ compiler, and nearly 30 times larger than Apache.
