I'm biased in favor or Arch Linux. It's fairly similar in spirit with Gentoo, but offers binaries rather than forcing users to build everything from scratch.
AUR packages usually require compiling from source code though.
AUR packages usually require compiling from source code though.
I love Arch's KISS approach and the ease of administration. Gentoo is an incredibly customizable distro that leaves quite a lot up to the end user, and because of that it can be a great learning distro for some people. But yes - at the time I made my switch I was becoming impatient with time time I was putting into administering it.