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I did the Gentoo thing a few years ago. It was a lot of work to get up and running and as you say, I didn't see any real noticeable speed difference over Slack. ArchLinux was pretty nifty and I played with it for quite awhile. I just didn't like having a different file hierarchy and placement of packages than Slack. I also had more problems compiling apps. It was just a matter of what I was used to. Setting up the inits manually was fun though.
Slackware is one of the more useable Linux distros made available. Something weird I've noticed is that when people start using Linux, they generally start with either RedHat / Fedora, or Mandrake, or SUSE.
Now, this was a few years ago but I do know this to be true:
Everyone I knew who was into RedHat back then, started using Debian or Gentoo.
The people who used Mandrake and SUSE, started using Slackware.
I'm not sure what I'd call it other than an observation of what was happening, but that's what I saw. Everyone I knew who used RedHat literally started suing Debain ad Gentoo.
It was odd but ah well.