For some users I would argue brew was indeed better - I can't judge for the technical level, but definitely so for the UX and troubleshooting.
I might have liked MacPorts with my current experience, but when I first needed to install CLIs and tools I did not have extensive knowledge of shells and paths and such, and MacPorts felt significantly less "integrated" especially when something would fail (as opposed to brew occasionally just asking if you want to overwrite symlinks essentially).
I'll never know if MacPorts was better once you're past the initial hurdles since I'm so used to brew these days, and I believe that sort of experience is probably not isolated. Given the propensity for Mac users to want something that just kinda works and gets details out of the way, I can see why brew succeeded.
You're probably right about Homebrew feeling more comfortable for new users.
Opinions on Homebrew may diverge with the answers to "How would you prefer to install? a) curl pipe to shell, or b) Download a DMG, double-click to install, and update your PATH." :)
These are not morally that different, the DMG installation can also do pretty much whatever, and I doubt people are picking apart the DMG to find the install script to verify that either.
I might have liked MacPorts with my current experience, but when I first needed to install CLIs and tools I did not have extensive knowledge of shells and paths and such, and MacPorts felt significantly less "integrated" especially when something would fail (as opposed to brew occasionally just asking if you want to overwrite symlinks essentially).
I'll never know if MacPorts was better once you're past the initial hurdles since I'm so used to brew these days, and I believe that sort of experience is probably not isolated. Given the propensity for Mac users to want something that just kinda works and gets details out of the way, I can see why brew succeeded.