Well the nice things about the emerge method is that it put all of the dependencies from kde in a folder rather than in the homebrew cellar and that might prove easier to work with later when we need to wrap it up in the bundle. It also allowed me to get the new stuff downloader working. One other thing that was really nice was that I was able to use a different qt install, but I dont know if that was good or bad since i did not test dbus support.
The bad thing about the emerge method is I had trouble getting it to accept the extra cmake modules from homebrew and had to install them manually. This actually caused me trouble with my other installation because it was looking for them in homebrew but it still needed the symlinks. Installing the ECM manually would overwrite the symlinks from homebrew. I don't know if I just did that wrong or what, but it was a problem I was having and only finally resolved last night.
There was one other issue with the emerge method. It built a great kstars app bundle that works great, but I could not figure out how to get kstars to build in qt creator or xcode using the emerge installation. For me that is crucial because I want to edit code.
If you dont want to edit code and just use kstars, I think the emerge method will get you there faster and with fewer headaches. Another nice thing is that the two methods are *mostly* Independent, so the kstars app file I built with emerge is still working great even though i 'accidentally' deleted some stuff which broke my other kstars installation.
I broke it because I thought it would be a good idea to play around and see what is really needed by kstars and whether i could install things in different ways and have it still work. I did manage to fix it last night but be carefull about deleting qt with dbus or deleting python. The first one broke everything and the second broke astrometry.net. I have since fixed them again though.