I think it is a great learning opportunity, but after using Gentoo for a decade or so, I prefer Arch these days. So if you want to learn more about Linux and its ecosystems, go for it, do it for a few months or years.

That said, I haven't tried Gentoo with binaries from official repositories yet. Maybe that makes it less time-consuming to keep your system up to date.

Been happily and very successfully using the official binpkgs, it works really well, sometimes there's a slight delay for the binary versions of the source packages to appear in the repositories, but that's about it. I guess it's kind of running Arch, but with portage <3! And the occasional compilation because your use flags didn't really match the binaries