I know exactly what you mean about time spent on admin tasks in Gentoo; I myself experienced the same when I switched my personal dev machine from Gentoo to ArchLinux. I still wouldn't blame Gentoo for the kernel issues, however.

It seems to me that Dobb's predecessor failed to understand what he was doing and therefore failed as an admin. If Gentoo required a level of understanding which he did not have, then he should not have been using Gentoo. That is exactly the reason I switched; I realized that I needed to spend time with other distributions learning more basic elements of Linux systems before I would be capable of adeptly administering a Gentoo system. In the hands of those more experienced, however, distributions such as Gentoo (or Slackware) are powerful tools.