In SVN, "merging" is a bad, scary, no good word. In Git/Mercurial it's an everyday operation that happens so seamlessly 90% of the time that you don't even notice. The other 10% of the time, you have great tools (i.e. 3-way merge tools) that make it easy to reconcile conflicting changes.

I was confused about all your "we avoid merging" comments, because I can't imagine how you could possibly work without merging, but this explains it.