If you ask me, it was the wrong choice. I work on a huge project that's hosted on Repo (full Android OS + big proprietary driver tree), and the lack of this feature has really cost me lots of time doing manual labor that could be automated.

Another decision the Repo designers made that I disagree with is the silly Change-Id added to every commit message(!). Since when do globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) solve problems instead of creating more?