I dislike the idea of a quiz to use the installer. As much as I hate to admit it, I am a "newbie" to gentoo, to some degree. However, I did manage to fairly easily install it by reading the handbook. It is pretty much just following directions, being very time consuming(took me about 2-3 days to get my first gentoo box up). I think personally, that a special guide should be written for the installer detailing everything needed to be done. If you are very insistant upon getting rid of the "newbies" in the IRC channel, and insist on having some kind of quiz, I'd make a quiz to enter the IRC channel.
Not to rant on, but my stance on gentoo, albeit against many of the developers, is that it is a fast operating system. That is, in my view, the only thing seperating it from other distros save for portage. Many people like to tweak every last bit of performance out of gentoo, which is great! However, I think gentoo should indeed be more user friendly. Don't get me wrong-I CAN install gentoo, and edit configuration files, but it is very time consuming, and not time efficent for me. I wish gentoo was very easy to install(like redhat), and included an easy to use configuration tweaker where you could EASILY change your cflags for basic optimizations for specific processors(you could select p4, amd64, etc etc). You would of course be able to manually edit it as well. The thing that I find so daunting about linux, as compared to windows, is the fact that you have to know what almost every single file does. Wanna change your sound card? You have to know where /etc/alsa is. It is these kinds of things that frustrate me. Don't get me wrong, I know MANY, if not all but me on this mailing list, are opposed to catering to end users who don't want to have to memorize a 40 page guide to know how to install gentoo in their head, but I think it would be a good idea to have gentoo easy to configure. I'm not saying someone who doesn't know how to install Windows will know how to setup and run a gentoo installation, but I think it should be easier to run then it currently is.
On another side note I things that the thing that is blocking linux from the end user are application installation, and driver installation. Come up with an easy way to do both of these, and i'll never use win32 again :).
Again, I want to reidorate, I realize that the main focus of gentoo is to cater to so called "power users" who know everything about Linux, and tweak everything in it. I just wish that I could have a tweakable operating system without reading 40 pages each time I installed it!
Sorry for the long rant :),
Mike