This is very interesting, and maybe sheds light on why Google decided not to hire Max. There seems to be some consensus that MacPorts has the better architecture, while Homebrew has been better at responding to users, even according to Max himself.

For Google, it's likely the former is more important than the latter for a lot of their projects. An architecture that doesn't scale or doesn't always do the right thing or sometimes messes up data, can be catastrophic at the scale of Google.