Probably Debian or Ubuntu would have been a better choice. But at
least they have something standardized and government-supporte d. In
their place I would have paid experts to seriously study a lot of Linux
distros and vote on the best choice for the population and support
mainly that one.

I'm not sure of their thinking but it could have to do with being easily compile
from source, instead of relying on someone else to maintain the repositories. I
agree that it is a curious choice as Gentoo is on the decline and has been
fraught with division and disagreement in the last few years, but the same could
be said for Debian. Each has a strong user base and committed users and as long
as that holds true the leadership can squabble all they want. There will always
be a strong community as long as the users believe in it and use it.

It will be interesting to see how it shapes up. It is called Nova and as far as
I know that name was controversial when the car used it. I can't remember why
and my Spanish is poor to non-existent.