End sarcasm.
I can compile my bloated BSD kernel loaded down with every available driver I'll never need in a fraction of the time it takes me to compile Firefox: that is, measured in _minutes_. On an underpowered computer it can take _days_ to compile Firefox with all its supposed dendencies. I say supposed because no one is really sure. It's too much work to check and really find out.
Anyway, negative coding has been outlawed. It's inconsiderate. Even if you found something that could be removed, you would sacrafice every ounce of your karma if you dared to remove it.
End more sarcasm.
The FreeBSD ports collection, like OpenBSD's or pkgsrc is black box.
Unfortunately, with that last line, I'm dead serious.
My solution to autoconf and libtool is to run make >log 2>log2 and then do some sed transformations on the logs to produce my own "compile script". Sometimes I even change libtool's script to make the "quiet" flag do what the "verbose" flag does, so it can't hide anything it's doing. I then save my "compile script" for the next time I need to compile the program on that type of system.
One of my todo projects is to analyse the sum total of *BSD patches, looking for patterns. One of my pet peeves is having to make patches just to compile a program on the each BSD. Silly little MI differences that totally defeat automation and require silly little patches even for the simplest of programs.
Anyway, you can't say that the youth has completely abandoned "traditions" from ye olde UNIX, no matter how much they seem to hate "old things". They stand by the old relics of autoconf and libtool year after year and even vigorously defend using them.
The reason they can't replace these crusty old things is because they refuse to put in the effort to learn how they work. If you want to build a better mousetrap, first you have to understand how the old ones work, and specifically how and where they could be improved.