Gluing yourself at the hip to homebrew is a bad idea IMO. It's trivial to install things yourself. It's just a matter of `./configure && make && make install` and you're done.
Also need to track down and install all of the dependencies, and the dependencies dependencies and all the way down, and figure out the right configure flags to pass, and what environment variables it needs and where it expects to look for header files and the like.
Doing all of that from scratch takes hours and hours. Homebrew lets me not worry about that, and instead be productive.