I have been experienced in different packaing systems, first of all apt and pacman, FreeBSD ports, dnf, zypper at parallel tertiary, with an ease to read their manuals I am early to master these systems.
However, due to high complexity, low clarity, unreasonable length from the Emerge and Portage manuals, I am now still no ideas to begin running Emerge. Within no arguments or options Emerge is just refreshing my cache, but dunno if every cache are refreshed.
How to simplify reading these manuals to make ease for Sabayon and same for Calculate?

What I saw from far away funtoo, sabayon, calculate are loosely based on gentoo, and gentoos portage.

Usually to update your portage tree
emerge --sync; also update layman (gentoo has a new config file which does also enforces layman now)

to get system information
emerge --info

to update -av = (is ask and verbose)
emerge --update --deep -N --keep-going -av world

to install something: (is ask and verbose)
emerge -av cups

to remove something
emerge --unmerge fancypants

Not sure if that is any help above!

rant off topic below: this above implies that they follow gentoos policy on the package manager, system structure, config files and such.
Which I highly doubt what i saw in the past on those sabayon newbies coming to forums.gentoo.org with their issues.

What I will not write and suggest, but think: I think you are better off with a distro with more users, and therefore using the main distro like gentoo should be the better choice. should be easier to convert your installation. sabayon is something exotic. And yes i am heavily biased on gentoo.

Hint: Gentoo wiki is decent source of information.

To make ease for it? Portage is not a tool you learn in one day and I think man emerge is pretty straightforward. If something is masked or you have a circular dependency, typically portage will tell you. If you need to know more man portage. I don’t really know anything about Sabayon or Calculate but if you are going to use portage, you might as well use the ‘distro’ it was made for.

** Edit **
I didn’t realize this was the Sabayon forum so I do apologize for my bias.