I really like emerge/portage, even w/out the "candy" feature enabled. Great color highlighting, and verbose messages about any config change(s) needed.
Portage was great but losing a day whenever there was a glibc upgrade or something that caused a more "exciting" upgrade than usual wasn't worth it. I wanted more stability after a while.
I can't remember ever having a glibc related update problem. eselect news is always there for me. (:
I only have rarely a perl update related problem, but usually solvable with a world update. And since there are now binpkgs I only compile what has differing useflags from the selected profile. Portage has never been better!
Ohh it's been a long time since I last used gentoo! I remember I used to love the green/blue (I hope my memory isn't failing me) combination everywhere </3.
I stopped using it because building the updates on multiple machines was becoming a pain and had a couple of drives fail, but those were good times!