What exactly is wrong with writing to /usr/local? It seems to fall in line with the FHS standard, at least as far as I can tell. Sometimes older versions of di

What exactly is wrong with writing to /usr/local? It seems to fall in line with the FHS standard, at least as far as I can tell. Sometimes older versions of different packages may be dependencies of newer packages. This is a thing that happens with software. When it's not a problem, `brew cleanup` gets rid of old versions. Most of the time brew does install binaries, they're called Bottles. When it can't find a binary, it compiles locally. Yes this is sometimes annoying but it's not a deal breaker, at least not for me. I'm not sure what you mean by "Breaking when the Apple devs wonder if it would be fun to switch things up a bit under the hood without telling anyone." This has never happened to me or anyone I know and furthermore Brew is a Unix compliant tool and OS X is a SUS compliant operating system. Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, it just sounds a little like you're a Linux user who doesn't or possibly hasn't ever used OS X. Brew is not a panacea but it's honestly pretty good. There's also MacPorts if you're used to more old-style tools and a couple other package managers as well. You can even use Nix on OS X.