Great to see that some ppl are again committed to providing good ebuilds for VLC.
I have just updated our gentoo page with some improved instructions
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-gentoo.html
Also i saw someone mention an issue with skins. I suggest to add a keyword "skins". This option could then enable the skins2 config option. Be aware that the skins require BOTH wxwindows and imlib. Especially the first is not always forced by VLC which is a gross oversight of the maintainers of that part of the code in my eyes.
I also saw issues with ffmpeg reported by you guys. 2 things.
1: vlc requires 0.4.8
2: vlc needs to be told about the way ffmpeg was configured
--with-ffmpeg-lame on vlc's configure line if ffmpeg was compiled with lame support. same for zlib and faac (although that might not be in this version of vlc yet).
It's a very unfortunate system, but well, ffmpeg buildssystem basically sucks for not reporting back to applications how it was configured and compiled.