Gentoo doesn’t have many descendant distros (unless you count ChromeOS, which is a whole other crottle of greeps), and most of them inherit all of its warts. That flexibility you praise exists pretty much because it’s a source distro—you can’t select which optional features you want if you don’t compile the code yourself.
I usually either run “emerge world” overnight with the --keep-going option or set MAKEOPTS so that I’ll have a core free for interactive use while it’s compiling. These days, portage won’t break your system on you—not like ~2005 when you had to run revdep-rebuild all the time to keep from hosing stuff—so it’s safe to update unattended provided you check the list of packages beforehand using --pretend, and mask or --exclude anything dodgy.