When I did the same for some homebrew formula I got a response a few hours later.
For me homebrew has a much more responsive community and due to their use of Github also a lower bar for contributions. Both might add to homebrew popularity.
MacPorts uses GitHub too now. We maintain much more ports than Homebrew, and few of our committers have time to regularly go through the PR queue, so our community seems inactive. But actually, we just need more hands on PR management.
One important distinction is that most active ports in MacPorts have specific maintainers, and we usually put off merging PRs until the port maintainer approves. With more than 20,000 ports, it hard for the committers to test every change thoroughly, so we rely on our port maintainers to resolve issues and review complex PRs whenever possible.
In Homebrew, any maintainer could review and merge a PR instantly, combined with fewer ports to maintain, average time to merge would be much shorter.