The Makefile should do things in a simple and reasonable manner. Making it a couple of lines shorter or more readable is always better. Examples include using a make .if construct instead of a shell if construct, not redefining do-extract if redefining EXTRACT* is enough, and using GNU_CONFIGURE instead of CONFIGURE_ARGS += --prefix=${PREFIX}.

If a lot of new code is needed to do something, there may already be an implementation of it in bsd.port.mk. While hard to read, there are a great many seemingly-hard problems for which bsd.port.mk already provides a shorthand solution.