I think this is pretty perceptive. I wish that there were more active development for the portage tree community, but the truth is, there is just so much _there_, and as I see it, gentoo hasn't been commodified by an enterprise (canonical, red hat, etc), which is both a blessing and a curse. Also, I think nobody really runs "stable" gentoo, because stable things on single systems are naive. This is part of the reason for the explosion of distributed systems (cassandra, hadoop, hbase, etc). I think most people who run gentoo (correctly) don't actually rely on one single system being stable.