Gnome / xorg / Ports / Release related nightmares

[freebsd at drseuk.f2s.com]

Hi all,

At the risk of being accused of being "a troll in the bikeshed", here goes:

I've used FreeBSD since 2.2.6 (c. 1998) and I love it. Never lost any data and I
trust it, thanks to all the hard work all the developers are doing!

Recently, I went through the 4.3 -> 5.3 / XFree -> xorg / Gnome 2.4 -> 2.10
upgrade cycle somewhat ambitiously in one go.

Currently I'm tracking 5.3 Release (though of course I'm aware that 5.4 is
imminent).

I need to use ports (1200+ of them on average in fact), yet they are only
supported for STABLE, yet the blind use of STABLE is not recommended.

Basically I'm asking for advice on how best to install / manage ports with
stability in mind. I'm guilty of mixing "pkg_add -vr" (Release based) with
"make install" (Current ports tree based) and "portupgrade" (which AFAIK kind
of mixes the previous two options) as well as resorting to the occasional "ln
-s" after a bit of "ldd'ing" (which is probably not advisable long term but
helps if you need a quick library link on a slow machine!). I realise that the
ports system is very clever and highly complex but is there not a way that I
can, somehow insofar as it is possible, obtain, say, a Firefox 1.X port
(probably delivered as a package) for a 5.3 release?

Hope this makes sense!

Cheers,

James