Interesting. With pacman, I tend to be doing pretty well. As well, it rarely changes the way big distros do, from my experience. Pacman being Arch's package manager. Though, this is for casual use at home, so, again, I don't have any of those issues. I can take my time to re-learn something, most of the time. :P But quite rarely do I have that issue. I can't recall having any issues, honestly. But that might just be my luck based on what's installed.

Yeah, but you can downgrade packages easily enough if there's an actual issue. I've never honestly had anything seriously go down from an update...Once or twice a config might have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ replaced and I had to rewrite it for the updated config or something. I keep an LTS kernel for emergencies, and as it's just for home use, I find no issues with spending time fixing issues. It's all a learning experience. So far, though, I haven't really run into any that weren't PEBKAC or Hardware.

Arch is a learning experience all on its own... I use it for home servers as well, since it's simpler not to switch between distros. Package managers can get confusing, considering each one can have slightly different package names. I like to use Arch whenever possible, honestly. It gives me a nice feeling once it's setup how I like it. I like the feeling "everything is fresh and up to date". Even though that backfires sometimes, lol.

I prefer Arch Linux, personally. Yourself?