I was bummed when I saw it launched in a crappy state. I thought it looked really neat as well. From recent reviews it seems they have fixed a ton of stuff and are rapidly working on other things so I copped it. Hopefully I can finally play it this weekend.
Jokes aside, you can do different stage installs where you don’t have to compile the whole OS. However I feel like the quality has dropped during the past few years and it requires too much tinkering. Back when everything was on spinning rust, the performance difference was very noticeable though.