You ain't kidding. I literally spent a week bootstrapping (read: compiling everything, starting with gcc) Gentoo to get a basic desktop up and running, back when that was a supported thing to do.

Would I do it again? Nah, probably not. Am I glad I did it in the first place? Eh, I was young, had a spare machine, and a bit of a masochist then. But I did learn quite a lot in the process.

These days, I think the closest you can get to the experience I had is building your own Linux from Scratch distro.