I've been using Arch Linux for a couple of years now, after I got annoyed at Ubuntu for dropping some of my favourite packages. And I moved to Ubuntu from Gentoo because I got sick of having to recompile everything all the time.
I still hope that I missed a fix for the problems I described above
Well, you did miss one fix for AUR updates - packer. Firstly, it makes installing AUR packages much easier, and secondly, it does AUR updates for you in a similar way to pacman.
Another thing is that one can do an easier install by installing ArchBang instead of plain Arch. The only difference between ArchBang and Arch is that the installer is different; more user-friendly, and gives you an OpenBox desktop system installed by default. But after the install is done, it's just another Arch system which uses the same repos etc.
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I still hope that I missed a fix for the problems I described above
Well, you did miss one fix for AUR updates - packer. Firstly, it makes installing AUR packages much easier, and secondly, it does AUR updates for you in a similar way to pacman.
Another thing is that one can do an easier install by installing ArchBang instead of plain Arch. The only difference between ArchBang and Arch is that the installer is different; more user-friendly, and gives you an OpenBox desktop system installed by default. But after the install is done, it's just another Arch system which uses the same repos etc.