Am I too resistant to change?

For a while now I've had a little beef with Gentoo, but nothing I couldn't just shrug off. Now, I think I'm at the point where the frustration of portage just doesn't make sense to me anymore. Not once, but twice in the last two days have I wrestled with portage only to experience a much more hassle free install after cutting OUT portage. I won't go into detail, but the nvidia-drivers and vmware-player were the two culprit packages that, in both instances, emerged and installed perfectly, but utterly failed to run.

So now I'm asking myself why the FUCK I deal with long compile times when portage is, in my mind, broken?!? I'm giving it till the end of this month to see how stable my system remains before making the decision to stay or switch. November 30th is the day. I have a lot of love for Gentoo, that's why I've stayed for this long. But now, I just don't get it. I hope things change and I decide to stay, but for now I'm thinking that's unlikely.