It's Clear I Don't Understand CVS Branching

[Dale]

I've got a big problem with CVS. I didn't quite understand it when I got the
job, and now the guy who did understand it is gone, so I need some help to
get me back on track.

The problem is, I can't figure out how to get things merged back into the
trunk, so the only way I can keep things in sync is to keep branching and
branching. That can't be good! My question is, since I'm now the only one on
the system, why can't I just set what's in my working directory to be the
trunk?

I know that what's in my working directory now is the way I want the code to
be. But when I try to merge anything, I lose stuff, I never know what
version of anything I'm going to get after a merge. So I make changes and
commit them, but then to get reliable updates to production, I have to do
branches and tags and then do a "cvs up -rREL_<current_release>" when I
think I should really just be doing a "cvs up" and have everything update to
what I've just committed into my working directory. And the file version
numbers are getting really long now, that can't be right.

Should I just restart from scratch at this point, possibly with a version
control system that doesn't allow branching?