That's pretty much my sentiment on Arch, too. I have another point, however, that is also very important to me:

If I break something, I can fix it. Guaranteed. That's not completely due to the experience you gather doing the "manual installation of everything" dance, but also due to how this process works. I've never had to reinstall my Arch system - there's always a way to save a botched installation.

As someone who likes to tinker with my systems sometimes (and who's reinstalled more screwed up Ubuntu/Fedora setups than I can count), that is really valuable to me.