@kaia @cell Well https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html is supposed to be a meme.

Kernel config is more interesting to avoid occasional weird distro choices, like there's a lot of security toggles and of course some are a bit arbitrary from a distro pov.
And being able to use the version+patches you need, like for bugfixes or very recent hardware.