Arch is an amazing distro and every one of my experiences with the community have so far been positive. Kind of a bummer to see people dumping on it in the mailing lists and LWN.
I witnessed rare similar cases of the random guy knocking on Arch's door and raving in about how he knows the world and everything and that we should all bow down before him but it never escalated to the point it has on that precise case.
Sad to see LWN publish an attack without making an effort to get the other side of the story first. If the complainer had made the patch submissions he claimed and that the Arch maintainers deny ever seeing, well it should be pretty easy to sort out before publishing the article -- if you're really interested in journalism, that is.
To me, it seems they are fighting really hard to make Linux a user friendly desktop platform. Even if it leaves behind some ways of working that us older Linux users are accustomed to, I think this is a worthy cause.
And now we're getting the Unity interface before it's really finished. I really think the new interface is something that works on netbooks but is a step backward if you're using a widescreen monitor or regular laptop.
But I'm just a knuckle-dragging throwback who likes minimalism, xmonad, and Vim, who doesn't stream audio over the network and thinks ALSA was perfectly adequate, etc., so what do I know? If I'm the sort who's happier with Arch, then I'm clearly not their target user anyway. YMMV.
Ubuntu is the antithesis of that (no judgement here, I am fairly marvelled at the "pop the CD in and it just works" result of Ubuntu).
You want to upgrade users to grub 2.0? OK, not a pressing need for me, but fine, whatever. But at least when you make that change include system support so I don't have to manually repair the grub menu's default selection every freaking time you update the kernel. </rant mode>