I got quoted 200$/mo with 7U and 2Amps (100Mb bandwidth) directly from HE.net which I found strange since the next power jump goes up to 600$/mo. This seems like a pretty good deal.
I don't think anything is wrong with the regular SVN releases but I think this allows them to put out patches quickly to their customers.
The version of SVN in the regular repositories for the Linux distributions is also generally quite far behind. They are distributing the latest version.