There are several reasons why, even in smaller groups, using git is advantageous (even if you have only yourself, no other contributors). I'm not going to name them all, but in my experience (I've used RCS, CVS, SVN and now git), some of the more compelling advantages are that you can:
- Actually permanently erase/fix bad commits from the repository without a painful full dump/tricky edit/restore cycle on the repository. I suppose everyone has some of those occasional moments sometime: "Aaargh, I meant to commit only this one file, not this tar.gz file that happened to be in the wrong place at the right time." Git allows you to correct the mistake without bloat in the repository.
- Patch management (instead of keeping around a bunch of patch files, simply create branches for every patch file you'd normally keep) made easy and trackable.
- And related to patch management: commit early, commit often, then cleanup/merge commits before actually committing them "for real" to the bleeding edge version.
For small groups it means that you simply setup a central git repository everyone pushes to. You get all the benefits of DVCS and classic central management, i.e. it allows you to have your cake and eat it too.