As pointed out by others, pacman is that good. Much faster than others, better dependency resolution, and AUR. From a productivity stand-point, AUR allows me to avoid the significant tedium of cloning, fiddling with, and cajoling a git package to build.
The most difficult part is the install, which really isn't that bad if you read the installation guide. My first install took about 2 hours, and now it takes ~20 minutes. When you install, you basically do the following:
1. Configure internet access (netctl is pretty simple) 2. Set up mirrors (if you're lazy, just enable the kernel.org ones, they're the most consistent) 3. Mount partition(s) - need to create them manually too; cfdisk is great 4. Install base packages 5. chroot - basic configuration (hostname, locale, etc) 6. Install/configure grub 7. Reboot 8. Install everything else, may take a few reboots to make sure everything comes up as expected
In my recent installs, I install the desktop environment (and drivers) and enable it before rebooting, so when it comes up, it's ready to go. The important thing to remember when coming from something like Ubuntu is that you need to enable services through systemd manually.
What I really appreciate about Arch is that I really haven't had to touch it since I got it configured. I run updates every week or so and check archlinux.org first to make sure there are no weird steps required to do an update (usually deleting a file on the filesystem or upgrading a dependency first or something due to a package change). I haven't had any significant breakage, though I have had to roll back the kernel once or twice in the last couple years (Arch keeps one backup kernel by default). Make sure to always reboot when the kernel gets upgraded and you'll be fine. Also, the issues I've had are because the nvidia driver didn't get updated with the kernel, so if you have AMD or Intel graphics, this likely won't happen to you.
I've tried a few different distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE), and honestly Arch has been the least finicky once installed. I hate release-based distributions since doing a release upgrade tends to break things.
Of course you’ll need to know basic Linux fundamentals and understand systemd at a basic level to get through the install process - but these are not hard, I think.
I wouldn't agree that installing Arch is that big of a hassle - yes, you don't a nice menu based installer, but really, after setting up all of your partitions, installing the root filesystem, adding a user, and installing some packages, and installing hte bootloader, what else is there to do? To be fair, the install process has become easier over the years, as things like timezones and locales are becoming easier to configure due to systemd. But I must concede, if you've never partitioned a drive manually, or added a user, you'll want to take your time. And I always read the wiki's install instructions anyway. And whilst this does mean that there's a bit more complexity associated with setting up Arch, if you're using installing a non-standard OS on your hardware, the knowledge you gain will by doing so will almost always turn out to be useful in some way. As far as tinkering with it, I've never had to explicitly tinker with exotic configs to get my hardware to work as good or better than it would on Ubuntu, and to get my exotic config requirements to work is far easier on Arch than it is on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro is so broken that I can't even boot the gnome installer on a VM. Besides, it's far easier to manage my machine if there's no auto-updater grabbing a lock on my package manager on for the first 15 minutes of a boot, every boot (looking at you Fedora), or having an update process that may leave you with a severely outdated kernel even though you jumped through the hoops to get a recent kernel (Looking at you Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).
I haven't made this experience with Manjaro on several systems.
Setting up Arch isn't just about partitioning and adding a user. That's trivial stuff that I'm simply not talking about. Though somehow Arch's documentation has become significantly worse for complete newbies ever since they got rid of the new user's guide and you end up having to read a bunch of utterly irrelevant stuff in order to find the magic incantation that actually works (and no, it doesn't actually explain anywhere why it works the way it does).
I've had to do tons of messing around with settings just to get Arch working properly on different systems. I had problems with resume working properly on my Thinkpad for forever, and less decently supported systems had more issues. I'm just not that kind of user anymore and I don't want to be my own tech support. I have enough to juggle in userland pertaining to my actual job that I simply do. not. want. anything going wrong that I'll have to dig into some obscure config file somewhere to fix.
Manjaro gives me most of the benefits of Arch without having to waste my time with setting up an Arch system just perfectly so it simply works. I have access to the AUR and I have reasonably up-to-date packages (and I do run unstable on my laptop, which usually works fine).
Some people just want to use Linux, not live and breath Linux, and this constant resistance against users who don't want to wade knee-deep in config bullshit is completely infuriating.
You run Arch. Successfully. Congratulations. You're better than everybody else.