Well you know the old adage : Gentoo is compiled for your computer in its condition so that’s why it’s fast. Here the Gentoo was baked in excellent atmospheric condition so that’s why it was an awesome install, configured for coolness :)
I think it was Debian with i386 packages. Compiling with Gentoo targeting my CPU and not a generic i386 machine made things much faster for such a crappy device.
It's just that for recent distributions, if you have a reasonably common and modern CPU, you already get most of the optimizations you need in the pre-compiled packages.