I think one of the benefits of Gentoo is how easy it is to fix. The handbook teaches you how to chroot into your system so you can use your own install media to fix stuff.
Yeah that's why I say that about portage. Though on the patching suckless software thing. If you want more than one patch on it, like I would for dwm. It ends up being more work through portage than just doing it myself. Since usually the patches fail after one, so you have to find the issue fix that like normal, but it has an extra step, since you have to edit the diff file to make sure portage can figure out what it needs to do to patch it correctly. Rather than just manually adding the rest of the lines that failed into dwm's source code. So I just end up still doing it without portage.
On the arch, arch wiki, and Gentoo wiki thing.
The thing I really like about arch, is how fast you can set up just about anything, it doesn't install a bunch of extra stuff that gets in your way, it adds basically just enough to have a working base that you can do whatever you want on top of, and not have to worry about dealing with yourself. I think that's part of why there are so many different post install scripts, and also distros based on it.
Also having a rolling release distro does have its own benefits. Particularly having support for newer software. Rather than just hoping the distro maintainers happened to pick a version of whatever you need that doesn't suck.
It does have some potential to cause issues, but at least in my experience with arch it really doesn't happen often. The way arch releases updates takes care of a lot of the potential issues for you (like issues with libraries and dependencies). Especially if you aren't running the testing repos, which I highly recommend against running.
On the wiki thing I find both the arch wiki, and Gentoo wiki are pretty good. The Gentoo wiki is still useful even if you aren't compiling anything. Generally if I am trying to learn about something I check both no matter what so I am using.
On the topic of learning how your system works. I have been messing around lately with a lot of the less used stuff lately. Like the bsd's (highly recommend not using them if I'm being real at best it's a good thing for learning about how a Unix system works, just save yourself some time and use Linux), and some of the older Linux distros, that do things a bit more like they did way back in the day. And while Gentoo has taught me some things about running my system. I feel like it's a whole new level you have to get into when trying to run those comfortably in modern day. You never realize how much automatic dependency resolution matters until you dont have it. Or an init system that just works with a couple commands.
