And yes, I fear to find only frustration for some tweaks and changes I can do only with Gentoo. Choosing how I boot my machine and such. No grub, systemd-boot instead, etc.
Debian is still the closest. Maybe I switch to it on my laptop, which I currently don't use much.
Maybe I should try something more ambitious like NixOS on the spare machine (laptop) and see whether it feels right for me; I can always fall back to Debian.