Maybe it was all placebo, but Gentoo's use flags are super well organized, and are one of the first things I missed when I transitioned to functional distros. Y

Maybe it was all placebo, but Gentoo's use flags are super well organized, and are one of the first things I missed when I transitioned to functional distros. You can still apply bulk transformation functions to every package (like those CPU optimizations, Guix even has a flag for this), or configure the flags in build phases by defining package variants, (some of which are provided in functional package repos, not often), but it's a lot of work. The Gentoo way of doing things pit the user in control and had a feeling of minimalism in the portage configuration files, straightforward use of directory structures to define masks and overrides, ubiquitous atom selectors. Even if it was only minutely beneficial, or caused "more trouble than it's worth", I remember it for how empowered it made me feel and how easy it was to manage. The same optimizations are much harder to preform in amy other distro, and that says something regardless of their effectiveness.