One of the reasons I moved from Gentoo 15+ years ago to FreeBSD was that it was mandatory to compile everything while FreeBSD provided binary packages.
It may be not that important today - but it was a game changer with single CPU core and 1GB RAM.
Sad to say that you are completely right, for the longest time after being on gentoo for a long time I switched to macos for a few years, and was using gentoo prefix, which is vastly superior than Homebrew. I added patches to fix upstream llvm to work in gentoo prefix on macos almost a decade ago [1]
I finally met someone at the GSoC reunion that wanted to get me maintainer status, but I never got them to follow through. He had already warned me that it would be a complicated task to accomplish. I kept mentioning prefix needing binaries as well. Imagine if gentoo prefix had been as easy to install packages as homebrew on a mac.
It's sad, but gentoo is a good example of why an open source project that is technically superior, cannot survive inferior solutions without good stewardship if they disregard some basic end user quality of life features. I would argue that that is also what killed opensolaris/illumos(which is basically on life support), because the people in charge could never get past their elitism and decide that for community engagement the kernel build needs something more simple that 100 layers of nested incomprehensible makefile/shell spaghetti.
Is it too late? Gentoo has always been a niche within the already niche Linux community, but they seem to keep chugging along happily. Are they having some problems?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, in order to define “too late” we need to define an objective and then figure out if we’ve passed the point where it is possible.
From the outside it looks like the Gentoo community is happy and stable being small. And that’s good.
I’m not sure Google copying some of their software and putting it on Chromebooks is a huge win for the community, although I bet some of the Gentoo devs are proud.
They have had the binary packaging capability for a long time now. It just didn't make sense to use it on a global scale considering the vast combination of packages they could generate (due to USE flags, profiles, etc) and the infrastructure needed to distribute them. They seem to have decided to offer binaries for the most common configurations. This isn't a major change. Perhaps the infrastructure also makes more sense than before.
One of the reasons I moved from Gentoo 15+ years ago to FreeBSD was that it was mandatory to compile everything while FreeBSD provided binary packages.
It may be not that important today - but it was a game changer with single CPU core and 1GB RAM.