New user confused by need to do huge upgrade

[Alistair]

Hello, All

I am a user of Linux for many years (and an aged BSD sysadmin from 
1985-1989), but laterly mainly use Gentoo.  FreeBSD seemed to be a good 
alternative, so I get the 6.0 release a few days after it was released.

Being a Gentoo person, I like the ports system, but with limited time on 
my hands, I also like the compiled packages.  I can get a working system 
from packages then compile my own ports as need or want be.  Or so I 
thought.

I installed from two CDs, and got a working KDE system.  Now, I want to 
do Firefox from ports with my own make.conf for P4 optimisation.  Good! 
  So, I sync with the sources using cvsup (just like emerge --sync) 
change to the Firefox ports directory, type "make" and enter dependency 
hell like has never been known before.  Everything that depends upon 
GTK2 must be updated before Firefox can be compiled!

I thought that FreeBSD would be more stable than Gentoo and Linux 
distros in general.  I now find that there is the most major release 
step (5.4 to 6.0) and within a matter of a few days later, both Gnome 
and KDE are subject to huge updates that require many hours (or maybe 
days - it's not done yet) of CPU time.

Maybe I am missing something.  However, I just cannot see why this is 
right. What I thought that FreeBSD would give me that Gentoo did not is 
a coherent system within which deveopment was co-ordinated. Instead, I 
seem to find the opposite.  The core group can offer a major release of 
the OS, while missing the fact that two hugely important development 
groups are just days off their own major releases.

Maybe there is a level of sanity I am missing as a newcomer to BSD, but 
I would really like someone to tell me where to find it so that I can 
stop having to use this bloody Windows laptop to post here ;-)

Regards
A