You say "simply", but in practice it's a pain, and it's not an
accident that sometimes patches just get thrown away when updating.
(And then fixed problems come back to life and someone has to spend
time re-debugging them, and believe me it's not fun to waste an
afternoon fixing a problem with a package you depend on to discover
that you'd already fixed the exact same problem with nearly the exact
same patch two years ago, and somebody just blithely deleted the patch
while updating.)
The order issue is irrelevant, we've always had ordered application of
patches.
This isn't true - in the very early days, we had patches that overlapped, and we got into trouble with the order of application of patch-* in at least one case that I can remember (this is when we had occasional multiple source files patched in the one patch file). So we introduced a policy that it was one patch file per source file. I'm glad to see the policy worked well, though :)
Much later, we started the move from the patch-aa form of patch file to the patch-<normalised-filename> style (and which I have come to hate, because syntax-coloring fails drastically on diff files which some editors infer to be standard source files. But I'll live)
All in all, though, I find myself much more sympathetic to Benny's and Greg's argument - pkgquilt seems overkill to me, especially for the standard pkgsrc case.
Best,
Al
PS. If you find yourself asking if people have read your mail, maybe the problem isn't with other people - perhaps consider compressing the points you're trying to make into a much smaller piece?