They have had the binary packaging capability for a long time now. It just didn't make sense to use it on a global scale considering the vast combination of pac

They have had the binary packaging capability for a long time now. It just didn't make sense to use it on a global scale considering the vast combination of packages they could generate (due to USE flags, profiles, etc) and the infrastructure needed to distribute them. They seem to have decided to offer binaries for the most common configurations. This isn't a major change. Perhaps the infrastructure also makes more sense than before.