As an end-user, I prefer Homebrew over MacPorts because Homebrew is simpler to get it installed and use in the terminal. MacPorts in other hand, takes some tinkering to get it working. It has problem detecting installed XCode because it was looking for a specific outdated version (this happened last month when I decided to give MacPorts a try and I uninstalled Homebrew before trying it out since both of them cannot co-exist together.)

It is likely that it is not the devs prefers it over MacPorts, it is likely that end-users prefers it and the devs are following what the end-users desires. Homebrew have huge catalog of software and libraries than MacPorts.