If I may make a tail-end comment:

Some of the "negatives" that people list are things that I would rather
call "wish-list" items.  Of course, I'm speaking as a disinterested
party here...(^&

The issue is I guess at least partially semantic, but failure to
support many platforms (as an example) is not a fault of the way
that pkgsrc is constructed---and *every* package system fails to
support "many platforms".  I doubt you'll ever get past that unless
and until there are far fewer platforms than we see today.  (^&

That's not to say that more support isn't desirable, but to me it
is qualitatively different than, say, "pkgsrc build framework is
confusing and hard to read".

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/