It's possible to end up in a different circle of dependency hell with macports, where it insists on installing 10 different versions of everything at great length, when you already had a perfectly good one. If I'm not a python or perl developer, I don't want to compile many different point releases of those language ecosystems just to run some little utility scripts. And then of course everything is connected to everything else, so you can end up trying to solve graph theory problems when you're meant to be working.
Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.
(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)
Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.
(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)