[LAU] Gentoo as a DAW platform

Since there's been some discussion recently about questionable choices from the distros about the way they build multimedia apps that people depend on, sometimes building large numbers of packages against problem libraries that can't just easily be swapped out and corrected, what is the prevalent opinion about Gentoo? Does anyone here have any comments about getting actual work done on a Gentoo workstation? I should say while asking this that I have done source based upgrades of the base OS and package system on FreeBSD for a long time, so I'm not unfamiliar with some of the ups and downs of this approach (days of compiling, packages that never really do quite integrate together, etc.). But FreeBSD isn't a very good multimedia OS, partially due to limitations in the kernel, which was made for TCP/IP, not for low latency. Should I have my head examined for even thinking of depending on Gentoo for a DAW workstation (which will also do some video editing and perhaps gaming on the side)? Or would this be an effective way to avoid all the distro politics and have my binaries compiled from nearly vanilla upstream and linked to whatever libraries I darned well want them to be? -- + Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys + UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will + University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of + Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, + James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky