The thing that makes Gentoo fantastic is the fact that it's designed from the ground up to make it easy and maintainable to add the one little tweak you want fo

The thing that makes Gentoo fantastic is the fact that it's designed from the ground up to make it easy and maintainable to add the one little tweak you want for your system. In all the other distros I've tried (all the major ones, many of the minor ones), they tend to work better out of the box, but straying from the beaten path results in a flogging like no other. A tuned Gentoo system just works™, whatever "just working" means for you personally. That might be a python 2to3 name collision when Arch decides to overwrite upstream, or a system-critical latency issue when SystemD does too much unnecessary garbage in kernel mode, or whatever, but all of its flaws aside I'm a very, very happy Gentoo user. Upstream binary packages are just another extension of that freedom. You already had binary versions available of a few major projects (or could roll your own build server), but making more of them easily available allows a lot more people to reap those benefits without having to worry about the huge time sink of building every little thing. If you need more flexibility (patches, use flags, ...) for a given package, that's still available and easy to maintain. This is a huge win.