OK, I give up. I tried my best to work things out with svk, but it wasn't meant to be. I could have saved myself a lot of pain had I listened to other's experiences, but I wanted to give svk a fair shot. Having done that, I'm happy to say I'm a git-svn user now.

If you are trying to choose between svk and git, let me give you a sample of the pain you can avoid by using git ...