I haven't found anything significant that was available, or more current, in Gentoo than in *buntu and in Mandriva. Better yet, the binary packages work when installed, and I don't get stuck in a dependency upgrade lock because some required file won't build or isn't the right version.
Sigh. We must run such criticism through the JH filter, and see if anything survives. (ie. it could be an email from someone who Just Hates everything he doesn't understand). Thus, if he doesn't like Gentoo, it's possibly because he couldn't get it running, not because it has any flaws. For example:
Nobody should kid themselves that using emerge is anything like building LFS, compiling and installing from a tarball, or the best practice, building your own binary .deb or .rpm files. Those tasks will teach you useful things about your system. Gentoo will just teach you to hate it because it's always broken.
Let's look carefully at the logic here. Logically, this is comparing binary .deb and .rpm scripts with "using emerge".
Not a fair comparison. This is two different classes. Why not compare "creating ebuild scripts" and "building .deb or .rpm"? Emerge is only "always broken" to people who don't know how to fix it, same as anywhere else.
So the true underlying question, having filtered the noise out: If you want to learn useful things about your system, do you want to study source or pre-compiled binaries?
Leaerning "useful things about your system" does not come from installing binary pre-compiled packages, HALF as much as it comes from installing from source. Yes, it's more difficult to master. So?
Gentoo. Smooth, and like a rock. And very very fast, managed by people who know what they're doing.
Look, I know VERY LITTLE, and I'm comfortable with Gentoo. It's not that I know a lot, it's simply that I do not despise what I do not know. Debian is still my favorite, even though it's "always broken." And Suse is what's on my dual-boot box, only because I haven't figured out how to get rid of it without clobbering the Windows partition. And none of these I despise. :)
Oh, and here is what EDOS says about packages. You'll see that "always broken" is not specific to any single flavor of Linux.
http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/PackageOverview
-Jared