Can you honestly say you remember the exact pacman syntax of how to perform a system upgrade or how to install a package? :-) For me the UX was a problem, even if technically the package management is good.
´sudo pacman -Syy´ to update the package db
´sudo pacman -Suy´ to update all packages
´sudo pacman -S package´ to install/update a specific pakage
´sudo pacman -U package.pkg.tar.xz´ to install a package from a local file (useful if you're using makepkg)
Those are usually enough to maintain my system. I'll have to hit the wiki for the various query options though. But if the CLI side of pacman bothers you, I'd suggest defining aliases in your shell's RC. I track my dotfiles using git and share them on all my machines, and this method works quite well for me...
$ pacman -Qs package
And yeah, this is exactly how it works. Once you learn a bit about how pacman works, it all connects, same thing as vim.
Useful if you have to jump distro's when you surely have your commands aliased.