For those who complain about default portage behavior: It changes constantly. If you can't accept the bleeding edge behavior, you're probably using the wrong distro. There are always going to be changes. Some you don't like, some you say "oh gosh, finally!". For the latter, I cheer, for former, I work around. EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS is your friend.
For those who complain about not knowing something was added/removed/changed. Most packages do a decent job of providing good ChangeLogs, either from Gentoo or upstream. It's not Gentoo's responsibility to make you read them. It's like reading the fine print. Yet you can't complain that it's not there if it's in the fine print. Some say there should be more "announcements" for changes, yet others say there are too many announcements and important stuff gets lost. One man's trash is another man's treasure. There just doesn't exist a sweet spot that will satisfy everyone. For those who complain about man pages being too cryptic/incomplete/etc. Man pages have pretty much always been designed to be reference manuals. The key word is "reference". They are not guides, they are not tutorials. They are more suited for "I know this library provides a function to do *this* but I don't know the function's signature". They are less suited for "I don't know how to do *this*". There are other resources for the latter. And if there are not, that's not the fault of the man page. But in my experience, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this, most people who complain about man pages are those who don't bother, or at least put *very* little effort, to *read* the man pages. For those who complain "Why do I have to compile all this stuff to get X?": Why are you using Gentoo? For those who complain about bugs/regressions: Why do you use software? For those who complain about software/features needed/unwanted/changed in a way you disagree with: Where is your patch? For those who have genuine technical questions; for those who can provide answers to those questions w/o being overly critical; for those who give back by submitting bug reports, patches, ideas, praise: Thank you. Gentoo is a rainbow with no end and no pot of gold. -a
