Your actual issue is that nobody has either (A) packaged the latest version for you or (B) placed the package in your (likely conservative) repository. You can always install a package without a repository, or, add additional repositories to your system.
And due to the proliferation of package management systems, choosing the right packages from a project's web page is quite confusing. In addition, rpm and dpkg have absolutely horrid command line interfaces, and the documentation is about as confusing as bash's man page. These are not trivial or easy to understand tools, necessitating further layers of abstraction like yum and apt. However, even these "simple" interfaces expose a huge amount of unnecessary complexity. If you disagree, look at the number of command line options in the rpm and dpkg utilities, and the strange and unexpected way that these command line options interact. It's not a clean system at its core. Suppose I want to do something extremely simple such as list all the packages installed on my system, how many words of the man page do I have to read and re-read before I can discover this interface? These tools share none of the simplicity of original Unix utilities, and are large monolithic beasts rather than composable units.
Linux package management is truly awesome, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have faults and that it can't be improved.
Edit: I just checked the manpage, and it seems 'localinstall' is deprecated. Simply using 'install' now does what it used to, though 'localinstall' still works for backwards compatibility. It really could not become any simpler.
Complaining that 'rpm' is complicated is like using git without the porcelain then complaining that it is complicated.
It does two things very well that ubuntu's apt-get doesn't:
1) consistently has the latest versions of your software 2) handles programming languages very well (that is to say, it makes you use rvm, pip, cpan, etc, instead of packaging _any_ libraries).
Those are not ideal for everybody or every system, but it's a damn fine experience for developers' machines.
No such universally agreed upon metaphor exists on OS X. They didn't provide a universal package management mechanism. In many cases, you just drag the package into your Applications directory and it's "Installed."
There is some room for improvement, in the early days, RHEL had a horrendous repository-interface system called "up2date" which was anything but. I think a lot of the uptake in debian systems, such as ubuntu, was that apt-get was so much better than up2date - which seemed to have never been updated after the initial release. Thankfully, yum came about, and now RPM based systems have basic parity with DEB system in terms of package retrieval.
The Net-Net though, is that Linux package management is fairly well defined, but hop onto any OS X system, and try and find out what package a random file belongs to, is basically hopeless.
Also, homebrew has a significantly easier project - OSX+homebrew is almost solely aimed at devs wanted a good experience around their dev environment. By contrast, ubuntu's packaging relies on it doing everything, making it suck for some things.
On one hand, the native installer is almost always updated sooner with the latest features and fixes.
On the other hand, the packaged version is usually vetted against other packages in the system for compatibility and stability, not to mention having all of your updates be done from one place.