I disagree on the ports part. I like it much better than any other package management system I've tried. For most common apps you can get a pre-built package with 'pkg_add -r'. They really stepped up their game when they embraced portsnap and let cvsup ride off into the sunset.

And if you need something special and/or exotic it isn't really that hard to build from scratch. I can guarantee 90% of the dependencies can be installed as a pre-built package.