Last year I decided to go whole hog on Gentoo. It was a failed experiment overall, too much recompiling even for me, however one thing I did get out of it was

Last year I decided to go whole hog on Gentoo. It was a failed experiment overall, too much recompiling even for me, however one thing I did get out of it was that I discovered I didn't need a bootloader. You can boot Linux as an EFI executable. Granted, you cannot pass any dynamic boot arguments to it, and initramfs is out of the window it seems (or I just never got it working), but it was remarkably easy to add the commandline options I wanted into the kernel at compile time and just call it as an executable automatically from the EFI BIOS of my motherboard.