<div>There's nothing _significantly useful_ to learn from Gentoo that you cannot learn from Arch. In fact, they serve the same crowd, except the latter serves the less patient. The competency required to set up _and_ maintain is similar for both. You are required to do a lot of reading, and some thinking in case you find yourself in a pinch. Neither is what I would call "hardcore", because hardcore in terms of computing is something like <a href="http://www.coreboot.org/">http://www.coreboot.org/</a> or designing your own kernel. Even a project like LFS is not "hardcore", it's "educational".<br>
</div><div><br>With that said, there's no reason you couldn't have configured a Gentoo system if you managed to configure Arch (aside from time and patience of course). However, why someone at this point of time would be at such a position is due to the Gentoo Wiki's current state. As you may or may not know, there was a problem with the hosting/server and most if not all of the content had to be ported to a new database. I used to thank the Gentoo community for the _largest_ documentation one could ever find, but now it's just a mess. Sure, you could get some of them from <a href="http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/">http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/</a>, but it's no longer the same. There were plenty of helpful material that newbies to Gentoo couldn't do without.</div>
<div><br>Anyone who has been running Gentoo can continue to do so, but if you're planning to deploy a platform anew I'd advise against Gentoo. If the trouble is reading documentation or competency, then Sabayon is a better bet than even Arch. You still have the same control over your system which is necessary for most of the Linux audio crowd.</div>
<div><br>Now about hybrid architectures, _a lot_ of distros allow for multilib setups even if they come native by default. On the other hand, Arch does not, and will not for the foreseeable future, support multilib. That is purely technical, as running a hybrid system is actually tainting it [[ <a href="http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Current_state_of_Arch64_developement">http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Current_state_of_Arch64_developement</a> ]]. But the idea of a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland is interesting.</div>