Conclusion about Gentoo:
Waiting for packages to compile is annoying. But the flexibility and the Gentoo wiki makes up for it. Also Gentoo now has binary packages so I don't have to wait for packages that I don't care about to compile.
I have taken inspiration from liskin's dotfiles here (https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/home/.xmonad) because he does the high density thing very well, I am trying to replicate the looks of his setup in my config, his one still looks way better in my opinion.