tl;dr:
Me rambling and mostly figuring it out on my own, read at your own risk.
I often say VoidLinux has one big con:
All other distros feel slow once you use Void.
It actually is a con for me at this point, because I'm looking for a "just works" distro. The last time I tried to use Ubuntu, it was at least 100 times slower than Void (and also rarely "just works").
Apt is slower during a normal update, than it takes fglrx to do it's thing. In addition to all those problems, Ubuntu has a way of frustrating me as much as a set of headphones that have that broken wire that almost works if you twist it just right.
Are there any distros out there that have at least a fraction the speed Void does? I'd like to have a distro on hand that has tons of packages so it's easier to test new programs I find out about that are not available on void.
The only distro I can think of that might match this requirement is Sabayon.
The only other distro that comes close, aside from Sabayon, is Arch LInux.
I'm actually looking into audio/video production, so any distros that are good for that, as well as being fast, is what I'm looking for.
xbps and runit spoil me. I expect too much from my operating systems now.
Honestly, I'll probably just spin up Arch in a VM to test packages. If I like the program, then I'll try to package it for Void. Void is missing a lot of packages for the artist community.
Unrelated question: How the hell does Void seemingly never break? I've seen a couple issues over the time I've been with Void, but it all seems to get fixed without my intervention. On Arch Linux, if I forget to update for a week, my system would crash if I tried to update.
Perhaps Gentoo would work out, just build a machine specifically for audio production and just never update it.
Anyway, I've pretty much answered myself here, but I'm going to post anyway. Perhaps there is something I'm not seeing.