Same with Gentoo. Some people pretended like doing a stage 1 install taught you more about the system. Besides chroot I don't remember anything I learned from it. Loved Gentoo though. Especially how configurable it was.
On the other hand, I learned quite a lot through many stage 1 installs. Don't think I ever would have grown so comfortable with a command line and Linux if it hadn't been for stage 1s (and screwing them up).