I failed at the chroot process at one point and ended up nuking a whole install.
I learned so much then though that has paid off in my career. Good times.
Incidentally, I had actually picked gentoo because the forums looked fantastic... My first linux attempt was with suse, but all the "interesting" answers were in German. So next time I tried the one with the liveliest forums. Turns out the forums were lively for a some of the wrong reasons (everything was hard), but the people were the right combination of friendly and incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. I learned a huge amount from the process and the people. Though, indeed, the whole from source distro thing was foolish, in retrospect.
Gentoo will forever be my "uphill through the snow both ways" story.