> I did it once manually over a couple of days. I suppose I hoped enduring the pain of waiting for the packages to compile would somehow make me smarter. It didn’t. I didn’t learn much.

Exactly my experience. Back in the day when all I knew was Windows and a couple of BSDs I wanted to get into Linux, because it seemed like it was going to become very relevant in the next decades. After years of slacking I thought LFS would probably be the ideal choice. Turned out it wasn't, at least for me. I ended up "learning Linux" with distros like Gentoo, Arch and later even Ubuntu, and by just replacing my production systems with Linux, which were still running on OpenBSD mostly. I have revisited LFS a couple of years ago and honestly didn't take much from it. I get the appeal, but it's not for everyone.

Exactly my experience. I tried LFS several times, but I didn't learn much. I learned more with Arch Linux, but I truly appreciate the work that was put in LFS, marvelous for the right type of learner.