I prefer Homebrew over Macports, because the Homebrew default is to use the stuff your system already has. Macports always wants to pull in (newer versions) a bunch of stuff that's already in OSX.

There's benefits to both approaches. However, I really only need a few extras on my OSX laptop, and I don't really want to end up compiling dozens of extra stuff just to get the latest version. Sometimes I want to force that new version, but only if there's specific functionality I'm after. Others really want to get the latest and greatest of everything constantly...