I used Gentoo on my desktop for about three and a half years. I loved it. But then several things kind of added up. First, while a lot of the software was kind of bleeding edge, they took forever (more than a year IIRC) to support Python 2.5. Then POE broke, on which I had built a couple of scripts I used on a regular basis back then. All of a sudden, some of the coolest programs I had written back then stopped working. :(
And then, I was kind of offline for about a year. When I had Internet access again, the first thing I did was try to update the system. Gentoo went on a compilation spree that lasted about 36 hours, then something broke. I thought rebooting the system might help, only to discover that my system had become kind of not-booting.
So I installed Debian and haven't seen or heard much of Gentoo since. A while later somebody told me that stage-1 installs were no longer possible and was quite sad.
But none of the Linux distros I use nowadays allows you the kind of control over your system that Gentoo gave you.