I ran Gentoo for about 3 years (and will likely return soon) and I reckon there are plenty of really advanced Ubuntu users who know more about how my system works than I do.
Any mainstream general purpose distro can do mostly anything and can be used by power users. Some should ONLY be used by power users, but that doesn't make them inherently better than a distro that both a newbie and a power user can understand and use.
You know why I use Gentoo? Literally the bragging rights. I doubt I'm optimizing things THAT much with my fancy compiler flags.