Well, that's not entirely precise - Riak was provided by Basho in form of old style binary backage, that had number of issues:

* was not working with soon-to-be-default pkg-ng toolset, what's important for those using it, as you cant switch back to old toolset, once you've used new one

* had unnecessary dependencies, like sudo (port is patched to use su from base system) and OpenSSL in certain version, which often was no longer in ports, and that required using libmap.conf, that, while working, was suboptimal

* wasnt providing any rc scripts

Hope that it clears it all :)