I think Arch is good in terms of "learning experience" for someone who wants to learn more about how a distribution is put together, but that's about it. I used it for a while, back in 2005 or so, but our later contacts have been... less than fortunate. I tried it again two or three years ago and my system regularly broke after every update. I eventually ragequit when I ended up with a system that wouldn't boot because, in The Great Move of Everything to /bin, it somehow managed to screw up the bootloader. I figured my data was going to be next, wondered what the fuck they were thinking even in the context of a rolling release, shrugged and wiped it out.
The Arch Wiki is a great repository of information though. It's even better than the Gentoo wiki was, back before it got (disastrously) wiped out.
> I'm curious how the more hardcore *nix users view it.
They probably think lowly of the whole Linux thing, but what do they know :-)
> But I was turned off by the culty vibe of the users and it seemed like a backwaters in terms of software versions, as everything outside of the core seemed severely outdated.
I found the culty vibe of the OpenBSD community to be far less obnoxious than that around... pretty much any major Linux distribution.
There are quite a few outdated packages in ports though, yes. That's often because of a lack of maintainers, but there are programs where that's just because of compatibility problems. There are very few broken packages, if any, in the ports tree -- and sometimes the broken status is very paranoidly assigned (i.e. I've had packages that were marked as broken but it turned out they ran just fine).