No the package system is not great - it's more an afterthought to ports and even using tools like pkg_upgrade etc. are not guaranteed to be 100% all right because of ports dependencies.
Also upgrading using only packages is a pain because the ports-* tools tend to use the ports version and not the packages versions as I found out. So naturally that option is gone. Also many ports are not available as packages in -STABLE or -RELEASE so installing one port means upgrading all the related ports as well and eventually switching entirely to ports as version dependencies can get clobbered by mixing ports with packages.
I found a lot of stuff I need locked up in ports and to upgrade to a new port, I need to upgrade the whole system using the ports tree to prevent dependency breakage.
I really love the base system of FreeBSD and its organization, but ports is only for those who can wait for long compile times. I prefer using applications to compiling them.
People on these forums might say Linux is rubbish, but for a laptop/desktop user stuff just works fine. Even my webcam works out of the box. I've already gone back to Debian currently, but I regret having to move back. Sadly I cannot deal with the compile time for ports and to say that packages is a decent alternative is misleading. It isn't by a long shot.
Apologies for the plain speak though. I know I will get flamed for this, but I cannot help being honest about my opinion. Hopefully one day I will go back to FreeBSD by the PC BSD route. When hardware support is even more improved.