Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardware + rsync to update. Probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever built, at this point I’m effectively building my own Linux distro from source and it’s all defined in Containerfiles! I have such affection for the Gentoo team for enabling this project, shocking to discover how little they operate on I’m definitely setting up a recurring donation.
I think it is a great learning opportunity, but after using Gentoo for a decade or so, I prefer Arch these days. So if you want to learn more about Linux and its ecosystems, go for it, do it for a few months or years.
That said, I haven't tried Gentoo with binaries from official repositories yet. Maybe that makes it less time-consuming to keep your system up to date.
Did you document this somewhere? I'm interested to know more