A Gentoo x32 release candidate

Well, I think you're confusing multilib and multiarch, which we do both of, but the non-standard way Gentoo treats multilib is mainly the result of doing multilib before it became standard. When binary distros went one way, Gentoo went another. This caused its share of trouble in the past (much less so these days) and efforts have been made to narrow that divide, but this can be a very difficult change to make when you consider that Gentoo is a rolling distro and does not have the benefit of standard releases where this kind of major overhaul can be done. Instead it has to be carefully phased in a bit at a time, which is what has been going on for the last couple years.

Some of the things we do may seem strange and needlessly different to those outside our little bubble (and I'm sure some of them actually are). But before you dismiss us as ignorant, please take a minute to consider that the challenges faced in designing and maintaining a source-based rolling-release metadistribution are very different from those of a conventional binary distro. The solutions we find to overcome these challenges are going to look very different as well.