port installation basics

Hello, I'm trying FreeBSD again (penguin news is depressing) and I
face again some of the problems I remember.

I am torn between packages and ports. I read discouraging things about
using both, and yet I seem to need both for the following reasons:

- there are a few things I absolutely must have on a system to do
  anything at all (so in particular, to set up and compile ports):
  bash, sudo, screen, vim, rsync, git. I think that covers it.
  These are not in the base, so I must install packages for them.
  This alone wouldn't be a show stopper because I could rebuild them
  from ports once I'm up and running. But.

- I have not figured out how to build ports without getting sucked
  into unbounded rabbit holes of configuration dialogs. I know the
  advice to do `make config-recursive` upfront, but it doesn't help:
  what seems to be happening is that I get config dialogs for *all
  potential* recursive dependencies of the port I'm building,
  regardless of my answers along the way. For example, even if I
  exclude X11 support in git configuration, I am then confronted with
  dialogs which are only relevant to gitk. Is there any way to avoid
  this?

- on the other hand, some packages are egregiously over-configured,
  often with GUI extras I have no use for. For example, graphviz.  I
  just want to run dot to build png or pdf files. So this would be a
  good time to use a port (which I assume can disable the GUI parts),
  if it weren't for the above.

Your thoughts?  Thanks,

-- 
Ian