Comment by contingencies

once? You obviously weren't using it long! All sorts of portage tree screwups would affect you periodically that weren't your fault. Details escape me, it just happened, my recollection is circa annually to 24 months. Usually accompanied by some tacit admission of guilt in an enews item. Longer installs were a rarity without a combination of paranoia and luck or a working snapshot setup.

One thing Gentoo would also let you do, unlike any other distro I'm aware of, was install managed cross-compilation toolchains with deep control preserved. An awesome feature if you are building images for variant embedded devices at any frequency.