Developing on the Mac has generally been an awesome experience over the years especially with OS X and the UNIX underpinnings. The long pain point in this area is the lack of a solid supported package manager. It’s not in Apple’s DNA to worry about power users who actually use the terminal, and they’re unlikely to ever consider it important enough to delegate resources too. MacPorts and its hipster cousin Homebrew have been around for a while, but they’re always a bit rough around the edges, missing packages here and there, old versions, and sometimes they need extra tinkering just to install. In all it’s a most un-Mac like experience.
I don’t know that it will ever happen, but I know I’d support a Kickstarter that promised to maintain a Mac package manager like rpm or apt for OS X. I don’t care if they use Homebrew or Macports and just make it more robust, or build a new one from scratch. I’d just like a simple install of all those open source libraries. Yehuda Katz did a simple installer for Ruby and Rails on OS X a few years back via a Kickstarter, so I know there’s precedent and this would impact a lot more developers. Saving hassle is certainly worth some bucks for a kickstarter.