Why is yum not liked by some?

[dave at tokyocomedy.com (Dave Gutteridge)]

> Reason why I ask is that freshrpms dont host packages that are usable 
> on any CentOS version. If you are pulling in packages from there.... 

I thought CentOS 4 was equal to Red Hat Enterprise 4, and freshrpms 
seems to have RPMS for Enterprise 4.

Actually, this leads me to a question I wanted to ask anyway. I've been 
advised here before that I should always try to install things through 
Yum or RPMs. I've been told that installing from tar files and building 
from source is a bad idea.

But what does one do when there is software that is readily available 
for other Linux distros, and is theoretically buildable for CentOS, but 
not available from the standard Yum repositories like Dag and CentOS's 
own? Is one supposed to contact the repository owner and request the 
software be included?

Dave