Gentoo certainly isn't a/bad/ distro, imo. In fact the portage system is quite nice for installing software. It's when you want to uninstall something that you run into problems. AFAIK, emerge/portage still has no ability to warn you if you're about to unmerge something that is depend for something else installed. Nor is there a quick, easy way to find out which of your/installed/ packages depend on which other installed packages. That, I think, is it's biggest shortcoming.
Gentoo certainly isn't a /bad/ distro, imo. In fact the portage system is quite nice for installing software. It's when you want to uninstall something that you run into problems. AFAIK, emerge/portage still has no ability to warn you if you're about to unmerge something that is depend for something else installed. Nor is there a quick, easy way to find out which of your /installed/ packages depend on which other installed packages. That, I think, is it's biggest shortcoming.