Interesting, had the opposite experience. Homebrew does almost everything very nicely for me. Macports not as much, although to be fair this was years ago.

My last experience with homebrew was a while ago, but it was a jankfest. The repo was littered with arbitrary major/minor versions of the same packages and the bottling metaphors (bottles, casks, tap, pour -- a cellar even?) are IMO contrived and do nothing to make things understandable. At one point I had to go create a Github API token and set it in my environment just to make the thing work again. And lastly, I just couldn't take seriously the idea that piping the output of curl into sudo is the install method for something that wants to spread itself across your filesystem.

Maybe I'm old, but it struck me like they're reinventing the wheel without even trying to understand what works with existing package management.

macports forces you to install 15GB application that lots of users don't need(xcode). Homebrew just requires the cli tools.

Not true. You can use the Xcode command line tools now, without actually installing the full Xcode. I do this on my home machine and it's fine.