Friendly reminder the whole original part of 'hacking distros' is to provide a standard base for professionals to use. That way you know everyone on the team has the same tools, same environment, and depending on how rigorous your reporting format is, it saves extra paperwork documenting your environment.
Sure thats not the primary goal behind a few of the hacking distros out there but imo those one are misguided. For the sake of learning, building (and documenting!) your own environment does far more for you. I know I've learned a few interesting things simply by stumbling across half-forgotten articles, blogs, neat tools, etc by doing no more than finding the source of some BackTrack tools I liked for my own setup.
And obviously for your own non-work shenanigans, your own environment will always be better than some hacking distro simply because it is inescapably tailored to yourself. If you're willing to run the risks, nabbing the repos from hacking distros isn't that bad of an idea (until you 'sudo aptitude update && aptitude upgrade' and find yourself staring at a broken kali installation).