I wonder if there's a compelling reason for these add-on distros (Fink, Homebrew, Macports) to be strictly "build from source" with no option for binary package downloads. For me, it just seems to add long delays in getting a tool installed, and adds frustrating dependencies on my Xcode version.
For that to happen, someone has to take responsibility for creating, managing, and distributing those binary packages. That's much easier said than done.
So, the simple answer is that no one has, as of yet, volunteered to do the work.
Fink ships apt-get which is still perfectly capable of using them.
For example Qt has a bottle: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula...
The reason we aren't doing this for more packages is basically people power and hosting (as I'm not sure Sourceforge would be happy we hosting the number of binaries we'd want to have).
Hope that explains a bit. Feel free to comment if you think we're taking a good/bad approach here.
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2011-Ju...
In my experience, those are quite common now - most of the packages I install are delivered as binaries.