Four years ago I built my first Gentoo installation. It's a rather steep learning curve at first, but quite straight-forward for anyone with a technical background, and I soon had a basic install running. Within a few months it was the best-customized, most robust and most enjoyable working environment I'd ever used.
Some months later I went overseas for a time, and reverted to a package-based distro for practical reasons (Gentoo is source-based), and have stuck with it ever since....