I daily drove Gentoo through university, a time when I was most reliant on my personal machine. I learned a lot, which was invaluable.
I really don't think there is that much difference between the Arch and Gentoo installation process, besides configuring the kernel and toolchain, which really just requires you to have a better understanding of the hardware you are running and critical components of the system.
IMO Gentoo is the best Linux distro, but I just use Fedora now and don't have to think about USE flags and compilation times.
...dammit now I want to run Gentoo again.