There has recently been a discussion on gentoo-dev about making portage output less noisy
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_4f0401066abe2dc04458a952ac2a17bd.xml
A solution was implemented to suppress the build output (the configure, make and install) by default, unless the user specifies --quiet-build=n explicitly. There were both supporters and critics of that idea, but no real data about what users think.
If you have an opinion on this, please visit the forums and participate in the poll and/or comment in the forum thread:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901858.html (plain)
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901858.html (ssl)