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.