I used MacPorts for many years without many issues - only recently just started to get a little too frustrated with some new utils that were Homebrew-only & finally capitulated. So you can get very far with MacPorts (& it's a far better system than brew).
Be great to see something gain traction over Homebrew but I have a feeling many devs out there will only ever bother publishing on a single distribution platform for MacOS (whatever happens to be most popular).
Yes and no. It's certainly true of most packages but the smaller the package, the more likely it is that the distro package maintainer will be [a/the] maintainer of the original project, even with Debian.
The same is true of Homebrew, etc. - most of the package maintainers aren't the original project maintainers, which is ultimately why MacPorts support is so comprehensive despite not having anywhere near the same user capture as Homebrew. But the places you see frustrating gaps will always be at the edges, where it may be the original project creator creating a Homebrew package & no-one packaging it for anything else.
