I had tons of issues trying to get Postgres to work on my Mac. Lots of other conflicts, too. I think the Mountain Lion OS upgrade fried my host dev environment, too. Eventually, I went the VM route....afterall, you're going to eventually deploy to a Linux box anyway, and there's enough differences that you'll feel the pain when you go to deploy.

And now, I don't have a polluted host OS with tons of versions of software. I can easily try out new technologies, kill the VM, and start over.

Keeping VMs for different projects in their on silo'd around is really convenient.

Switching OSes or upgrading, rebuilding a computer, etc. I don't loose these configurations.

The list goes on and one.

RAM is cheap. I think I paid $100 to upgrade my Mac Book Pro to 16 GB.

I can also switch back to a host Windows machine and take my VMs with me (should the need arise)