Just clear up the impression of the personal dig, I don't hate Gentoo. It's interesting and amusing, and true to it's "ricer" image it's great fun to tinker with and tweak, to solve those little puzzles it's always throwing at you. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, and I enjoy it.
At other times, though, I require my computer to be a tool I use for work, and I don't want to be interrupted and to have to spend two days tracking down why sound failed _this_ time, just so I can have tunes while I work. (Or worse yet, why X won't run when I need something that's in an X-based app.)
I think gentoo's advantages are mostly imagined and/or exaggerated. I notice this is frequently from people who like to spread FUD about RedHat, or binary distros in general. While I don't like where the RedHat distros are right now, I think they're a very valid, useful, valuable way to do things if you just need a system that does it's job.
Unlike a majority of the LUG members, I don't write code, for a living or for fun. I know six mostly obsolete programming languages, and I can make scripts do some pretty amazing things, but I don't code. That means that some things that are important to coders aren't as important to me.
I mainly mean to advocate the good qualities of binary distributions in general, and RPM based systems in particular. I mean to correct some of the exaggerated claims so that people who haven't tried gentoo or an RPM distro aren't misled.