Preference between files/patch vs PATCHFILES

   Is there a preference between including a patch file in the ports 
tree vs downloading it as needed?
   It seems less obtrusive to use PATCHFILES when the patch is available 
as a change already committed by upstream for future versions so that we 
don't add yet more files to the ports tree (which could use some serious 
file count pruning). Consumers of the patch may be slightly more 
impacted by time to separately download the patch than receive it as 
part of a ports tree. Unlike distfiles, patches are usually quite small 
but the count of small files adds up in a tree of over 30,000 ports. So 
many files lead to performance loss when extracting and searching 
through the tree. Some simple shell commands easily overflow due to 
counts and require rewriting or breaking into pieces.
   The one advantage I see to /files is I have learned things from ports 
I was not looking at by grepping the tree without having to 
download/extract every port.