I guess it depends on whether you want to jump in the deep-end or not. If you do, then you either sink or become a good swimmer. If you choose the shallow-end then things are easier, but you're not going to be that great because there's more to learn. I didn't want to attempt to install Gentoo, make a mess, and then give up on Linux altogether.

I do like the idea of doing things pretty much from scratch, though. The Mandrake install confused me thoroughly just because of the number of packages that were installed. Maybe I'll never need half of them (or more). That's definitely something I dislike about Mandrake.