I'm still pretty new to Macs, but have been running Linux servers for several years. I've done my share of compiling from source - especially with Apache - but I'll take the package manager option every day of the week. RPMs and automated update managers like yum, apt (and even appupdater for Windows) have made my life much easier.

Say what you want about dll hell (and most of it will be true), but dependencies offer their own special flavor of hell. I'm not a sys admin (and don't care to be), but a developer who needs to be just savvy enough to right the ship in a storm. Package managers are just the right speed for what I need.