It's possible that udev doesn't do the module loading itself and that it's a function of the initramfs scripts, I haven't been following lkml lately. But the kernel doesn't load modules. If you've got the drivers built in statically, then yes it'll initialize them with the rest of the kernel but that's non-standard these days.
I never said tell a novice user to do that, I told you to do that because you don't like UUIDs. Most users will just let Ubuntu use UUIDs and have no problems. While I like options, I don't see the problem. Ubuntu decided that UUIDs make the most sense for them. If you don't like it you can always change it after the fact with very little work. But UUIDs work just fine despite your statement to the contrary.
I don't think the term proprietary means what you think it means.
Not all Debian packages build in the same manner so saying 'Debian requires make depend before make.' is a flat out lie. And if you use dpkg-buildpackage, like you're supposed to, you don't have to worry about each package's individual build steps. And that even assumes that you're building a Debian package from the source code, if you just want to build the code from upstream with autoconf and make you can do that just fine as well, nothing's stopping you from mucking up your system that way.
And once again, none of it is proprietary. It's all completely open source, not restricted by any trademarks or copyrights and can be used by anyone who wants.
They most certainly do change the compilation rules. You pick whether ALSA, GTK, etc is enabled in the build and thus the binary and it's dependencies are different. And Gentoo's ebuilds support 3rd party patches, http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Writing_Ebuilds#Adding_a_patch so I guarantee there's at least 1 package in there that's not 100% identical to upstream as you seem to think.
Last time I checked Gentoo's package manager (term used very lightly) didn't check dependencies on removal which in my mind makes it completely worthless.
I.e. it's an ugly hack required because they don't have a real package management system. If I install an updated package that requires newer versions of it's dependencies those dependencies should be updated as well. Doing otherwise is just plain stupid.
I just picked coreutils because it's something I knew you had to have installed. The fact that you're adverse to upgrading further enforces that Gentoo's package management is crap. Minor updates like that should be stupid simple to install, like they are in Debian. Gentoo and stable are virtually antonyms.
I choose to run sid/unstable on my workstations because it's a rolling release and I never have to worry about major upgrades. I install whatever updates are available every few days and I always have the latest packages available. Obviously, For a server I would run stable and only apply security updates.
Because it was probably the worst suggestion possible. Gentoo's only real use is as an example of what not to do with a Linux distribution.
None of my posts were directed at you personally or even cruel, but if you can't take some criticism and debate it's probably a good thing that you're not in the computer industry.