I have just started looking into Trilinos for a project I am working on and I found it convenient to use the prebuilt packages for initial development. Building Trilinos is a bit of a pain and for any development I always look at what is available in the distro. I would of course build the package from scratch once I meant to deploy full scale to get benefit of proper optimization. I found it interesting that these packages were being provided as a part of the distribution, I was not expecting that.