Do you propose abandoning sparemint then? I don't see any other way. If Alan's patches are available, I will make use of them. It's fairly easy to translate information from gentoo ebuilds to rpm spec files and vice versa. It is in this way that we can cooperate and use each other's work.
I just want to say I fear the situation when you'll get tired, Alan will get tired and we end with half-made two distros. It's always better to focus on one thing but I can't comment if it's better sparemint or gentoo because we only know Alan's work is in progress atm so hard to say how much he has done already.