I did enjoy Slackware as a learning experience all those years ago, but nowadays I like to spend more time building things and less time futzing with the OS.

Eh, I don't know... I don't really fuss with it much. Admittedly I did the first few times setting up, but now my desktop dot-files move with me, get a minor edit every so often, and once every couple of years I have to rebuild some packages....

I guess if needed lots of packages on the fly, or changed machines every few months it would be different. But it's once in a great while... then solid and stable for a long time.

To be frank, I would rather build packages from source. It's not I'm suspicious, but I run into plenty of problems with versions etc. using package tools, and it's really not that much more work just to do it the basic way.