Finding a new distro... part 1?

I've been looking pretty seriously at Arch to replace Gentoo, so this post will describe my experiences and impressions thus far. I set up a VM to try the install and get a feel for the distro, and so far it seems OK. The install was easy and pretty fast, although I would have liked the ability to configure my kernel at install -- a step that, at least after years of Gentoo, was conspicuously missing. As expected there are a bunch of modules loaded on boot (61 total iirc), and boot time was actually painfully slow -- about 50 seconds! I'm not sure if it's the VM or all the extra garbage at this point. On the flip side, getting a working X configuration up and running with Openbox took all of 10 minutes, a process that would've taken significantly longer on Gentoo. At the same time, I wasn't able to try out the nvidia prop. drivers since it's in a VM -- who knows how well that will work, but if my experience so far is any indication, it should be fairly flawless. Another plus is that the latest (beta) nvidia drivers are in the repository (180.16-1) which is nice. Now that I look at my sync dir, I only see 177.82-1 in my local sync, so I guess my repositories aren't configured correctly.

The package management program pacman will take some getting used to. It certainly is much faster than emerge/portage, and not having to compile everything from source is a big plus. I do like the ports tree structure of portage though, maybe just because I'm so used to it, but I do like being able to see everything that's in my current repositories without having to go online. I can see all the packages, but I already miss seeing general categories (e.g. net-irc, www-servers) to give me alternatives to apps I already use.

Something that would be nice for me is an option to configure disk encryption at install. There's a guide on the wiki on how to do it, but iirc Debian gives you an option at install which I think is awesome. Also suspiciously missing on install was the ability to add a regular user. Maybe I just went through it too fast and missed the option, but it was very surprising to have to log in as root immediately after install. I do like the idea of different projects within Gentoo (e.g. gentoo-hardened) and at this point I do not know whether Arch has anything comparable.

So here I am, now questioning whether Arch is the right distro for me. I wish I had a more concrete idea of what I'm looking for or where to look outside of distrowatch. Someone recommended Slackware to me recently, and maybe I should give it another shot. I'll keep working with Arch to see where I end up and we'll see what happens over the next few weeks. Happy Holidays and have a happy New Year!