It might be more correct to say they occur far too *often*.

It's not all bad. Does anyone remember how a couple months ago it would take 30 mins to emerge --sync, with the disk crunching the whole time (at least on my machine)? Now it takes like a minute. That was a pretty sorely needed change.

But I do agree that Gentoo seems more intricate and less stable than 3 years ago. Some of this intricacy must be related to increasing flexibility and power? But I don't use my box for anything different than I did 3 years ago, and I'm becoming increasingly glum at the thought of spending the whole frickin weekend updating my machine and debugging problems with the update! I am this -><- close to just buying a Mac and roughing it out with the beautifully integrated suite of built-in apps.