The project's obsession with compiling from source by default is ridiculous - not only does it mean that installing trivial packages can take an age, it means that major OS updates can and do often break the ability to build a package, while a compiled binary runs fine.
Case in point: it is currently impossible to install the Homebrew package for casperjs, as it relies on the package for phantomjs, which will not build on Yosemite. The phantomjs developer/team have said that they WILL NOT be fixing phantomjs 1.x so it will compile on Yosemite, because their efforts are all on 2.x.. which is not stable, and also won't compile on Yosemite.
When I mentioned on twitter that (quote) "The more I use @MacHomebrew, the more I miss Apt." I was asked by one of the Homebrew maintainers to not @ mention them - because apparently I was being "not nice" by mentioning a far superior package manager in the same sentence as Homebrew.
The whole thing has given me renewed interest in researching a better packaging system using the built-in package installer.