Wassercrats,
I rarely agree with your viewpoint, but I seldom downvote your nodes. People are entitled to their opinion even when it appears they are deliberately trying to be close minded and argumentative. I am going to give you my opinions on the matter and you can choose to do whatever you will with them.

Commercial products rarely support multiple platforms. They are written to take advantage of the OS and system architecture that the vendor has chosen. When they do cross multiple platforms, the support is typically very limited.

An Open Source project is not much different in the beginning. Then, volunteers work to port it to other platforms. In many cases, they realize that not all the users using the software are developers, and provide binary installations for these platforms. They also realize that a developer tends to want to have control over how certain things are done and that these choices can only be made at compile time. It sounds like you would rather be in the binary installation category and there is nothing wrong with that.

I will not speak about Emacs as I have never used it, but I do have a lot of familiarity with Pg. From their FAQ page, it speaks about non-unix platforms that are being supported. "A native port to MS Win NT/2000/XP is currently being worked on....". It then points to step by step instructions for installing it using Cygwin. I have followed these instructions numerous times and never had a problem. In fact, the only time I did have a problem is when I did not follow these instructions and jumped through a bunch of hoops because I was listening to everything everyone else (self-proclaimed subject matter experts) were telling me to do.

My suggestion to you is to look for binary distributions whenever possible. Sometimes that will not be available for all platforms - especially when volunteer work has gone into porting it. When you are compiling from the source - realize that it is intended for developers that want control over what is going on, and have enough knowledge to figure it out when it doesn't go perfect the first time.