linuxmemes

I wouldn’t say they are user unfriendly, just not fit for beginners. There are definite advantages to those distros for advanced users, as they offer way more customisation than beginner friendly distros.

Installing an OS by hand and compiling the packages you need on top of a bare bones system is a great learning experience. It also gives you the most flexibility, for better and worse.

Often its to learn about how a linux system works under the hood, also Gentoo can theoreticly have a small performance boost (tho on modern hardware its extremly small).

its only joking