The last time I ran FreeBSD, it seemed like the way the ports worked made it, in practice, something like running Arch or Gentoo. The ports tree didn't seem to branch into any kind of stable platform. It's been some years, and I do remember some VuXML thing for checking for packages with known security vulnerabilities so you could just upgrade those. This is in contrast with, say, NetBSD's pkgsrc, which it looks like they try to keep in a stable state and rotate quarterly. This is also in contrast to OpenBSD, where a version of the ports tree is synced to the OS itself. (You can upgrade to a -current ports tree and run it on -stable, but that's not "supported", despite typically working.)
So, is that still the current state of affairs? I'm just the sort of person that prefers packages held at a fixed version and patched for a while. In a lot of ways, I like FreeBSD, but it appears to be, de-facto, in terms typically used to described Linux, a rolling-release server distribution. Perhaps some derivative or other project tries holding a stable set of packages or ports on FreeBSD for some time?
Leaving packages at a fixed version and patching them is a terrible idea. This is a Linux mindset and while it was fun for a few years it does not scale and it is not sane. You're effectively forking the software by diverging from upstream and then you have the fun of creating new security vulnerabilities by incorrectly backporting fixes. Go look at the update history for Apache HTTPD on RHEL -- this has happened several times in the past.
That said, since FreeBSD 10.0 there is now a stable "quarterly" branch which is enabled by default. The goal is to relieve you from the rolling release trauma for 3 months at a time. You get security and bug fixes: if it's very trivial, it's a backported patch; if it's a minor update, we will not hesitate to do that instead; if it's a major update and we don't trust backporting the fix, we push that update. The goal is to prevent major changes that could break compatibility or default behavior when possible, but that's not always achievable.
Anyway, it works pretty well. We will continue to strive to be better, but it's very usable. We heavily rely on the community for feedback and notification if something has been overlooked. Please try it out and let us know if you have any problems.
FreeBSD land seem a lot more package centric after the introduction of pkgng (now just pkg) a few years ago. It's, in my experience, fast, simple and reliable. Not half-baked like the old package system. Even among those why build themselves it seem fairly commom to use poudriere (a jailed package builder system) and then just install packages from there.
Other than what already was mentioned a lot of ports follow software's individual branches. There are multiple branches of PostgreSQL, PostGIS, ElasticSearch, etc. So you get to choose those and combinations of those, which is very unlike Arch Linux for example.
So, is that still the current state of affairs? I'm just the sort of person that prefers packages held at a fixed version and patched for a while. In a lot of ways, I like FreeBSD, but it appears to be, de-facto, in terms typically used to described Linux, a rolling-release server distribution. Perhaps some derivative or other project tries holding a stable set of packages or ports on FreeBSD for some time?