That example of how to upgrade for security fixes is much more complicated and less reliable than Debian's "apt-get upgrade". For example, take a Firefox or PH

That example of how to upgrade for security fixes is much more complicated and less reliable than Debian's "apt-get upgrade". For example, take a Firefox or PHP security vulnerability. Those projects generally don't just release a new version with the security fixes; they'll throw in whatever feature changes they've made along the way. I don't want to sort through the various changes and patches to find the right combination; trust me, it's no fun, I worked on the Debian security team for a while. It's important to me to get just the security fixes because I don't have time for a constant upgrade treadmill and there will be new bugs in with the new features. I really want my operating system to just work and get out of the way. If I didn't need any packages from ports, I think FreeBSD would fit that bill.