Ref T2230. The SVN protocol has a sensible protocol format with a good spec here:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/subversion/libsvn_ra_svn/protocol
Particularly, compare this statement to the clown show that is the Mercurial wire protocol:
It is possible to parse an item without knowing its type in advance.
WHAT A REASONABLE STATEMENT TO BE ABLE TO MAKE ABOUT A WIRE PROTOCOL
Although it makes substantially more sense than Mercurial, it's much heavier-weight than the Git or Mercurial protocols, since it isn't distributed.
It's also not possible to figure out if a request is a write request (or even which repository it is against) without proxying some of the protocol frames. Finally, several protocol commands embed repository URLs, and we need to reach into the protocol and translate them.