It’s certainly not complicated. Just tedious. That said I like the BSD style portage.
These days I tend to run on Arch based distros. Because they are close to those levels of configurability. Just a bit quicker to setup and get to a nice preset. I know there are pre made stages to skip some of the tedious setup for both gentoo and vanilla Arch. But then why not a distro where that’s the base. And some of the sub distros like Garuda provide some really nice configuration tools on top of the base experience.
But you were there right?