I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but does anyone else still work in an environment where they have to do synchronous version control? It's a nightmare and I have yet to find a decent solution.

To give an idea, this is a proprietary system that is extendable via scripts, but all of the artifacts are exported via XML files where script source is escaped into one XML tag within the metadata. Same with presentation layers, the actual view XML is escaped into one line within one attribute of the metadata file. The "view" xml may be thousands of lines but it is escaped into a single like of the export file so any change at all just shows that line as being changed in a diff. Attempts at extracting that data and unescaping it even seem to present problems because when the XML is exported often times the attributes within the schema are exported in a different order, etc.