Heh. In my last job we used Gentoo as the build system for an embedded system. It was a joy to use. In my current job we use naked Makefiles chained together. I waste somewhere near 50% of the day building things I don't need to build, rebuilding things because the last time they were built it was with the wrong options, fixing build bugs where modifications didn't make it into the final binary etc etc etc. Makes me weep.

But seriously, Gentoo was the bomb. Your package doesn't impact anyone else until it's .ebuild is updated. You can precompile most units of the system once a day and download them as binaries. For 4 years of my life I didn't have to worry how things were being built, except for my own very small part that I had mastered. Bliss.