Odd — I'm running Snow Leopard and haven't had any issues with many of the libraries or apps you mentioned (boost, ampqlib, postgresql), although it's probably worth noting that I installed them all through Homebrew (http://www.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/).
That reminds me of another thing I disliked about macs. An open question: who is in charge? Macports? Fink? I couldn't pick one, because neither one had what I wanted.
I think Homebrew is fairly new. If it works, I'm glad, but it didn't exist a few years back. So, a disclaimer I should have included in my original post: things might have changed in the past year.
The package manager I found useful was virtualbox + apt-get.
MacPorts and Fink both annoy me. Not because they are bad but because they are "so close but so far." I end up mostly compiling stuff manually and managing /usr/local with GNU Stow. Which is frustrating because so many mac installers seem to want to install stuff into /usr/local. I've learned to unpack the installer and install it manually so my beautiful stow-ness isn't compromised.
Same here, homebrew rocks Fink and Macports way out of the water. If you need any type of packet management and you are on a Mac, it should be your go to option.
psycopg2 on snow leopard has been notoriously fucked forever. There are thousands of blog posts on installing this, of which only one has worked for me in the past.
This, granted, wasn't through homebrew; I wonder if that would have worked back then
