I've talked about it during pkgsrcCon and with various other developers.
  In short, I strongly dislike the current way MAKE_JOBS is handled.

My view is that in 2007 an upstream source package is buggy if it fails
with -jN.

I have enabled MAKE_JOBS, and have been committing MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=no
when I have trouble.  It's been only a small fraction of the packages I
build (which includes a lot of gnome stuff).

I use pkg_rolling-replace, and rebuild a fairly large number of my ~400
packages very month or so.  Typically I have to add MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=no to
1 or 2, but much fewer now than when I started.

Right now MAKE_JOBS defaults to off/1.  Given your comments, it sounds
like you don't ever set it.  So are you objecting to pkgsrc being
incorrect, even though it doesn't bother you personally, or to the noise
from committing MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=no, or something else?

  (a) For most packages it is like playing Russian roulette.

That's overblown.  In almost all cases, one can recover with adding
MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=no and rebuilding.

  (c) It doesn't work for most of the larger packages.

I just egrepped and found fairly few marked packages.  Am I missing
something?