You've correctly understood the nontrivial costs involved in trying to use Gentoo on production servers, and correctly understood that the benefits aren't relev

You've correctly understood the nontrivial costs involved in trying to use Gentoo on production servers, and correctly understood that the benefits aren't relevant to your personal use-cases, or the most-common use-cases for production distributions in most industries. I don't at all read your parent as asserting that all production deployments should make use of a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but instead describing the specialized features that are useful for some specific niches. If you have some business reason to want to run arbitrary combinations of different versions of different software together, or to more-easily manage distributing software to your platform with many different features that you sometimes want compiled out, or otherwise if a slow stable extremely-reliable distribution isn't handling your needs, you might want to consider using Gentoo instead of building all that infrastructure yourself. That's not the case for you, or for me, and that's fine. You've described some of the reasons I also prefer a stable well-supported distribution and don't use Gentoo. My reading of your comment is saying that because you personally have no use for the benefits, therefore Gentoo is completely unsuitable for any production use ever. If I've misread your comment, and you were just commenting on your personal use cases without trying to speak to any general audience, I apologize for my mischaracterization.