well, maybe you should try again sometime.. cause once youve set it up correctly as you like it, you dont have that much work afterwards, eg when updating progs... its just 'emerge -up prog' and an 'etc-update' in case config files have changed - thats it, very nice, fast, simple..
also ive not heard too much good things about the 'updates' of those distros.. i did an update from mdk 8.x to mdk 9 once, then suddenly all of my kde apps acted very weird... i didnt resolve the prob though, i was hardly using linux back then..