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The biggest single idea I was hoping to get traction is the necessity of introducing a "stable" ports branch, which doesn't have to include all ports but for starts some more-than-minimal subset (e.g. the "FAPP" set). The main reasons for this are:
 - Introducing ABI stability between the ports - so if some popular library changes (like libjpeg, libpng, glib), hundreds of ports on a working production system don't have to be recompiled. (in the defense of the current system - this recompiling works and is automated)
 - Introducing binary packages and faster patch time - because maintaining binary packages where everything changes after such an ABI breakage is next to useless.

Unfortunately, the general feeling is that this cannot be done because of infrastructure limitations and because of port maintainers' time - they would be hard pressed to maintain separate sets of ports (the current "HEAD" branch and one or more "stable" branches). I see the infrastructure limitations can be serious but these are merely technical problems - they can be solved automatically one way or the other. The second problem - new demands on ports maintainers' time - is more significant.

I'm not a big ports maintainer - I semi-maintain only two ports - but I don't think it would be particularily hard to maintain a stable branch of the ports tree because of one simple reason: the porting work is already done and "maintaining" the stable branch mostly revolves around updating the ports with newer distfiles (source files), where applicable. Of course there are edge cases - such as that for security reasons some ports (shared libraries mostly) simply *must* break ABI, but I think this could be solved by at least "borrowing" patches and ideas from similar systems that have such a "stable packages" idea successfuly implemented (e.g. most of the big Linux distributions).

To test this, and to prove (mostly to myself) it would be doable, I've proposed a Google Summer of Code project. This is probably the last time I'd be eligible for it. Here's what I proposed: