I agree with the both of you, this can be annoying sometimes. But a few rules of thumb avoid this issue to happen in general in my experience:
True, we also have sometimes the dreaded conflicts in the java folder that seem pointless (empty directories etc.) and are hard to repair with all the users of the teamserver (I would repair and commit, but then somebody else gets the conflict and does a repair and then the next person gets the conflict). Our sollution is to send a mail to all the developers on this teamserver with the steps to take in svn. Only if all the developers do the exact same steps it seems that this errors wil be resolved by all.
That said, it does not happen very often (about 4 times per year but we do not use java code very much). So yes, if this would disappear I would be happy. But I still now of the days without the teamserver and these were much worse :)
Regards,
Ronald