Uninstalling a bigger group of kde packages takes a really long time due to many symlink protection checks. Symlinks are of form /usr/share/doc/HTML/en/{app_name}/common -> /usr/share/doc/HTML/en/common which seems to be safe to remove and were found so on my system. There are 2 possible solutions: 1. exclude the symlinks from protection 2. check and remove them all at the end of emerge (each check took ~15s which is not tragic but I was depcleaning ~80 packages)
I don't think there's any need to optimize this case, since it only occurs when you remove the kde packages, not when you upgrade.
