The beauty of Arch is that you set it up from head to toe, so you only have the things you need most. And if something breaks, you're more likely to be able to fix it.
Accept no substitute. Vanilla Arch forever.
(I accept that some people don't care about how the sausages are made. In that case, use Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu, in order of similarity to Arch.)
I use Arch for my SoC devices (RPi2 and Odroid XU-4), and for that it is hard to beat. I install what I need, configure it and then forget about it. But for a desktop? I didn't get a computer so that I could spend an hour getting WIFI to work the way I want.
I have built LFS more than a dozen times, I used gentoo for the better part of a decade (back in the days when linux actually was harder to use than osx/windows). I don't have to prove myself worthy any more. Give me an easy way to setup arch with stuff like X, network-manager and media hotkeys working out of the box and I'd switch any day.
So: arch is a very nice distro, but online it has somewhat become what gentoo was in the early 2000: an e-penis enlarger. The only thing it proves is that you have the time and knows how to copy and paste commands from the arch wiki.
Now I run emacs on CentOS 7. I only do security updates and have been using guix to handle userspace (Userspace = mostly emacs).
For work I have an Ubuntu laptop. We code pascal, so I almost never leave the GUI. After configuring Unity I actually like it a lot. I might switch to ubuntu on their next LTS release (which, after all the kinks are worked out, will be 16.04 + ~4 months)
Setting up wifi was as simple as just installing whichever manager you want and getting going, though. Contrary to a lot of peoples' experiences I seem to have a really easy time with Arch. Most of it just works after install.
I just recently bought a new laptop that I had set up within a day. A lot of that time was spent playing around with various hidpi settings, though.
And it certainly helps that I have most of my configurations in my dotfiles repo (including media key bindings).
I love Arch, but Debian min install will always have a place in my heart for getting set up easily while still being extremely fast and custom.
That's it, really. There's a bunch of stuff you probably want for a functional system, like user accounts and graphics drivers and stuff. And yes, Arch is still a pain with laptops. But with practice you can get it up "from scratch" in 20 minutes tops.
Hopefully you'll note that I didn't actually say anything about proving yourself. I even gave a list of other distros. But my point was that you don't need an Arch-based distro when there are plenty of distros that are better at giving you an easy way to set them up.
If one's ego is so seriously fragile that they depend on an operating system to feel adequate... well, it's kind of sad. It wasn't my intent to imply anything about people using distros I like less, if that's what you got. But this distro in particular is probably not as useful, because there are many more "user-friendly" distributions.
Or Apricity?
I won't be using this distro, but you've done a seriously poor job of condemning it in favor of some cherry-picked alternatives.
> without having the hassle of having to know how things are configured and what not
Really ? User doesn't need to know how to set and fix things on Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian ? Now that's a bold statement.