I remember all this stuff going on back in the day.
We were running #Gentoo in production at a research facility at the time and it was, umm, interesting, as the quality of the portage tree was very uneven during this time.
Directly related, maybe... maybe not. Shenanigans certainly didn't help I'd expect.
We moved to #Centos in ~2008 IIRC. We were #Redhat before Gentoo so it was a 'comfy old shoes' move.