When Homebrew was written, neither it nor MacPorts had widespread binary caching by default like they do today. Homebrew was written to take some shortcuts to

When Homebrew was written, neither it nor MacPorts had widespread binary caching by default like they do today. Homebrew was written to take some shortcuts to reduce compilation time vs. MacPorts at that time. It was also written to be simpler to hack on and package for, since the author found MacPorts harder to work with than he'd have liked. I think it takes the metaphor too far but I've seen Homebrew fans praise it as making things like repo management accessible to them when they started using Homebrew without prior experience with other package managers. So maybe it's useful.