Arch has turned out, surprisingly to be much easier to maintain, since things are well documented and consistent.
Agreed. I've moved all my private servers [1] to Arch, despite everyone warning that it will break all the time, and I've never experienced any sort of breakage (except when I did stupid things myself).
[1] Currently, there are three: one physical machine as a homeserver, and two VPS for public services.
It was a big help to get more into i3. It also includes a lot of helper scripts. I used them in the beginning to get things done and later switched over to the "real" commands. inst -> pacman is an example for that.