The USE flags (feature compilation option) can be a bit tricky to manage, but they’ve tidied up the defaults quite a bit.
The one thing that might still be hard to get right is having all the media codec you need. I wish they’d include it in the default so I didn’t have to fine tune it myself, but well, that’s just part of the fun, and I already got my battle-tested set, so I got nothing to complain.