It was mostly a joke, back in the day when I started using freebsd, it seemed that the answer for 'how do I do such-and-such with FreeBSD' was, most of the time, 'cd /usr/src && make such-and-such'
Indeed -- annoyance with that is why I wrote FreeBSD Update. My view is that regular users should never have to compile anything, and I certainly wouldn't be happy if the first option for running FreeBSD in EC2 involved running a buildworld.
But I'm just fine with saying that this is an option for people who want to make their own changes to the FreeBSD base system. (And moreover, anyone who is making such changes is unlikely to be scared off by the buildworld/buildkernel; in fact, they've already done it, when they were making their changes offline.)
Why is freebsd-update(8) so slow? When upgrading between releases, it's significantly slower than apt, yum, dnf, Solaris IPS, pkgin, FreeBSD's own pkg(8), Windows Update, macOS update, while fundamentally doing less than any of these tools. It's bordering on being unusably slow.
FreeBSD Update is doing something it was never designed for. I wrote it as a tool for security updates -- which inherently affect just a handful of files --and have a number of paranoid checks in it, in order that it can be safely run blindly.
We needed a tool for upgrading between releases, and I was able to hack that into FreeBSD Update, but I didn't change the fundamental design. At this point, we're all waiting for pkgbase so there's no reason to revisit the design now.
I agree. OpenBSD also has/had the same problem. Until not that long ago, they didn't even have downloadable bootable ISOs. You either had to buy the CD, or roll your own CD from the file sets.
