No, but homebrew doesn't break things up into an insane number of pieces either. In the context of this blog post, Riak on homebrew is a single package.
Yes, and my /usr/local isn't a freaking .git repository. Homebrew, bikeshedding what MacPorts achieved a decade previous (and getting it horribly wrong) since 2009
Sure, pkgsrc has made it easy to manage third-party software on Mac OS X for over a decade. Lots of other platforms too, with root or without. Homebrew is cool, but I'm pretty happy about being able to use the same package manager everywhere I go.