I've been using Gentoo for about a year now. I used Void Linux before that and Void is also pretty darn good. My suspicion to why there's "so little love" for it, is that Gentoo seem a little off-putting with a multi page manual just for installing it; dozens of manual steps and configuration. And for those that get through that, some probably fail to understand some of the various Gentoo concepts and so by next system update, they end up with a broken system. Either way, the Gentoo wiki and handbook is pretty good, so once you use Gentoo you aren't in total darkness. I guess that the average user would want a Linux based system that *just works*™ and that's where the likes of Linux Mint, Ubrowntu and friends come in. Actually, on my work laptop I use Linux Mint because I had no time to go through a Gentoo installation on it, so there's that too. Gentoo has a feature that I very much appreciate, the "Use" flags so that anything I install is customized to what I need. For example qemu with risc-v support. I have a few applications configured specially like that, such that in other distributions I would need a separately crafted package for that, or at least compiled and separately installed to /usr/local. Then keeping said application updated...yeah nah. Update times on Gentoo doesn't bother me too much, once a week I run through it and my 3900X CPU compiles software fairly fast with its 24 vcores.