"One of the key issues is the information you get from the changelist. It's not that we don't want to see checkins, it's that the checkins that result from [merging branches] don't convey information. Or if they do, it's not obvious and right up front like it is now. I puruse the change list every day to see what's going on. It's critical to my global view of what's going on."
For the most part, we all work in the mainline. Each changelist description is representative of the changelist.. That is, there aren't any "Work in Progress" titles. So our manager can read the changelist titles to see where the project is headed.
If we move everyone to their own branch, to simply sync to mainline we have to merge the mainline branch into our own. In Perforce, that means it creates a changelist that's checked in. Annoying when you're reading the unfiltered changelist titles, but there's something even more annoying: All your work has to be checked in before you merge from the mainline (otherwise you get horrible merging problems).
"Like it is now" <-- What does that mean?