I've used all four those you mentioned in the top, to my mind it's six of one, half a dozen of the other, really... They're all good. I didn't use one of them for more than six months, and I think that having used all of them I managed to end up understanding a lot more than otherwise... did it in this order:
Slackware - Gentoo - LFS - Arch
Used arch in the end because of a reccomendation I got from somewhere and it had been a long time since I'd used anything computer related, so going the LFS route again just wasn't working... I was actually really happy with Arch until my mobo blew, :-( so now I'm relegated to an old laptop as my only machine. Just as an aside.

I preferred Gentoo, I think, of all of them, simply because I liked it's way of doing things. I went to some effort to set the flags the way I wanted them, so all my apps had the features I wanted and nothing more, everything was optimised for my system, it was all very quick. That being said, the temptation is, when setting up these systems, just to copy-and-paste bits of code and not actually understand what is going on.

Just my 2c.

Arch and slackware are my personal favorites. I am currently using Arch.

I installed Crux linux 2.6 via vitualbox. The installation is straight forward. The only time consuming part is compiling the kernel. It took about 2 hours. I setup grub and rebooted and had a fast running i686 optimize virtual machine.

I think I will install crux on a second hard drive and dual boot arch and crux.

This thread is almost a month old.

One month is not that old, I seen posts that were several months to a year re-opened. That's really old

Slackware and Arch don't really push the "compiling on site" and (in my limited experience of them) aren't really all that configurable. Gentoo is very definitely a build-from-source system, and has very good support for configuring how you want things to be.

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