How big stable is Gentoo community

Hi

I have been considering using Gentoo (attracted by its BSD style package management system - an acquired taste picked up during a brief dalliance with FreeBSD) to replace a slackware 10.0 router firewall fileserver machine. I would have stuck to slackware, but the continued lack of a package manager that handles dependencies properly (like Debian's apt-get that powers most of my other machines) really is vexing when you need one new package installed and have to hunt down its dependencies (reminds of the bad days with Redhat), download them and install them. Debian spoils you - you no longer need to reinstall everytime a new release comes out. Further, such an occasion is a chance to learn something new. I have decided against using FreeBSD as it does not provide full read-write support for reiserfs and my backups are on reiserfs formatted media.

However, I just read that Gentoo's creator, Daniel Robbins, defected to Microsoft a few months ago. That news is troubling at two levels - that he defected at all (not that bad), and that he chose to defect to Microsoft (this is very wrong - surely Novell or Redhat would have loved to hire him).

Whatever the real reason, I want to know how "stable" really is the Gentoo community - after all, its the first newer distribution that I am considering using (prior experience - Redhat, Debian, Slackware). Is it a little like Debian, which has a mbuttive worldwide developer contributor base and is the "father" distribution to some 150+ other distributions, or is it a distribution that is showing signs of fading away after a great start ? The documentation for Gentoo available online is certainly impressive, and in some cases superior to that of some of the other distributions I have used, which usually indicates the presence of a large number of contributors. While that is comforting, I would like to hear your opinions.

I apologize if the questions provoke a flamewar, but I need to know what implications has the defection of Daniel Robbins has had for Gentoo. I like the ports system, and would love to use this distribution, but the need for a distribution that is going to be around tomorrow, like Debian, or Slackware, etc. trumps that consideration. Its part of the reason why I have so far stuck to distributions that have been around for a long time.

GC