your reports of the os X installer are almost spot on the same as my
experience. i found that it worked ok, but there were a few
glitches (such as the gui, hid, the 'tab' key mysteriously stopped
working...etc) ...that's why i was sticking to my tried and
tested 0.37 installation.
i don't think that it's a problem for people to have to install pd for
themselves, but as hans said..."The major sticking point right now is
that most Pd devs use their own build system, instead of all us using
one. If we all used the same build system, all of this integration
would happen more or less automatically."
THIS is fundamental.
if every package could just work with < ./configure , make , make
install > (or whatever) it would be a lot better
but that's not just a pd problem... it's everywhere in linux based software