MacTex vs MacPorts

Dear all,

This thread was prompted by another thread I started recently, which
has since been resolved:
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2011-September/025653.html

I installed MacTex a couple of years ago, and although I'm not
currently using LaTeX for anything, I may want or need to use it again
in the future.

MacTex has the advantage that it bundles everything needed for using
LaTeX on the Mac, including several handy GUI applications (BibDesk,
LaTeXiT, TeXShop, TeXworks, TeX Live Utility, and Excalibur), and
provides versions of each of these components that should be
compatible with each other. (Only two of those six GUI applications,
incidentally, seem to be available from MacPorts: LaTeXiT and
TeXShop.)

However, MacTex has the disadvantage that it sits outside of any more
general package management system (e.g. MacPorts), which has the
following ramifications, IIUC:

(1) it bundles utilities that may already be present on the user's Mac;
(2) if any of the utilities it bundles *are* present elsewhere on the
user's Mac, then the user is forced to decide which version to give
precedence to in the $PATH variable or other settings, and problems
may arise if other software installed on the Mac expects whichever
versions of those utilities that have *not* been given precedence in
the $PATH;
(3) its components can't be upgraded with a simple package manager