Agreed, but also: it's important to know that some of the "hardcore/tunable" distros don't provide a good understanding of how components fit together either.

I don't know how it is now, but many years ago it was a running joke that most Gentoo users hadn't the faintest idea of how anything worked, but felt "hardcore" because they could pass many command line flags to the build and felt they were "optimizing" their system -- actual gains were not demonstrably noticeable, but they "felt fast" -- and they had no understanding whatsoever of gcc flags for example. Experienced users had to patiently explain that no, you shouldn't pass that experimental flag to gcc or everything would break.

"Hardcore" Gentoo users believed that by "installing from source" they somehow magically ended up with a faster system. No empirical evidence, of course, just a heartfelt belief compiling source code was magical.

This kind of "hardcore" Gentoo users was very, very, very annoying. Users of Ubuntu were better off: they understood what they worked with regularly and didn't pretend to understand what they didn't need to understand.

I see similar issues from a lot of Arch users tbh. There seems to be a lot of posturing of being a more advanced user, when thats not always the case. I once saw someone confidently explain that their drive device was /dev/nvme instead of /dev/sda because its an arch thing.

I've tried one such "hardcore" distro once (Crux to be exact) and while it was fun for a while, I also wasted a lot of time. Nowadays, I just stick Ubuntu Flavor (am actually running Lubuntu right now) because everything works mostly out of the box. Yes, I know it has its own set of problems, but I have different priorities. I dont particularly care if I get labeled a noob for it.

I also do know a bit of super linux knowledgeable people who dont need to tweak their system and use ubuntu. Sure they used to run super tweaked systems but by now they use lts ubuntu, manually tweaking g their desktop gets old fast. (That said, they do tune the embedded file system they build on that distro and that they are responsible of.) Or developers that work on their interesting problem which is not tweaking a linux desktop.

What does Ubuntu offer over Fedora or Red Hat enterprise Linux?

I'm not saying everyone should run Gentoo, I'm just saying that there is a much more of a justification for Gentoo existing than Ubuntu.

Ubuntu just re-invents the wheel with a bunch of nonstandard stuff so Canonical can sell support see AppArmor, Snaps, Mir, Unity etc...

I just (last 2 weeks) switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu for my personal/home VMs (Linode!). The risk of crap breaking on a emerge world ... was just too high. I think the final straw wsa something related to python2/3 issues breaking emerge it's self. I rebooted it into safe mode, spun up a new Ubuntu image, and rsync'ed to /old_linode/ and then reinstalled bind9 and apache2 and etc. The thing I liked about having local compiles for everything is you could gdb any system binary. As a C programmer for many years, I like seeing real code.