I have been using Gentoo for over three years and I feel exactly the same.

Updating the system after half a year when I didn’t have time to do it? Absolutely painless, everything works.

And I get to quickly remove parts of software due to USE flags.

Also, no releases, I just update, no changing sources, no full-upgrade… just the same command every time.

There are binay packages for folks who don’t want to compile locally.

Gentoo is the way.