Who compiles the binary in the configuration I want? What distro extract all the options out and allows me to install X11 apps without CUPS or alsa or dbus or anything else my system doesn’t actually need? The point of Gentoo is to set a single config file to say “whenever you do a ./configure make sure you disable X features, enable Y features, and uses my specific compiler tunings to target a specific use case or build.”
For example I never default building apps with guis. I’d rather be able to SSH in and use everything that way if possible. I then select the very few applications that actually get their GUI interface or configuration tools built. Can’t do that on binary distro.