Lately, since pkg was introduced I find myself installing stock packags most of the time. Only if I want X compile time feature enabled I'd use the ports system. Updates are faster as well. I used to `make world`, now I just do `freebsd-update -r <release> upgrade`.
I'm still a new user so I deliberately choose to compile ports to learn the FreeBSD way of thinking about stuff, understand how packaging works under the hood, and not fall into the trap of thinking it's "almost a Linux". Compiling ports is surprisingly convenient (at least after I learned the config-recursive make target...) and works most of the time.
But that said, letting the compilation of JDK 1.8 run overnight isn't exactly convenient, and for the next install I'm likely to use precompiled packages, confident that I do know how to compile ports on my own should I want to.
Yes, cases similar to building jdk from the ports collection are exactly why prebuilt packages exist. It's now very easy to provision a new system since the new package manager was introduced in 10R, pretty much like in Linux. Yet you also have the option of using ports tree and customizing packages yourself using `make config` and the building and installing them using `make` and `make install`. This is easier than installing source rpms or debs and customizing your build mainly because it's menu driven and all the popular options are on the menu.
FreeBSD provides a quartely branch (enabled by default since 10.2) with prebuilt packages that are supported up to 3 months, to avoid moving too fast and breaking things. There's also the latest branch, with the latest and greatest stuff.
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/p...
In my experience, the design of FreeBSD makes compiling projects much more easy. The standardized system really helps at many tasks.
But few projects are designed to only support FreeBSD. In the UNIX world, Autoconf still reigns supreme.
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html [2] http://www.freshports.org/categories.php