... and then a member of the Arch community writes a really nice document about alternatives and work arounds and fixes and puts that on a wiki somewhere.
The Arch documentation is a jewel, and I very much hope they manage to continue that tradition.
Archlinux is doing amazingly well by sticking with the "Arch Way", even when it has user visible side effects (lol haskell). This success is evident from distrowatch, this survey, and others.
That's what most ditros do. Fedora and openSUSE anyway. While we wait for upstream to fix the issue and release a new version, we prefer to have a working package, though.
Bugs from Arch are urgent, simply because all their users are stuck waiting on the fix which means affected users will be interested in updating and communicating about the upstream report. Also they are probably on an unpatched recent stable release, which makes a good baseline -- either the bug was fixed in master since the recent release, or it is still present and real. There's little question whether a bug is caused by a distro-specific patch or not, because Arch linux packages are more or less thin build scripts around unpatched sources. You find things like .desktop files and systemd unit files in the Arch package repo, but not many source patches that might introduce unreproducible bugs.
It's easy to see why running Arch is painful for a sysadmin: You get stuck with all the variance in maintenance quality of upstream packages with not much recourse other than building a fixed package from source yourself (thankfully this is pretty easy with Arch's build system). On the other hand it's easy to see why this is great for the linux ecosystem: A popular distro running recent unpatched stable binaries means a lot of testing of releases soon after they come out, which surfaces upstream problems faster and encourages faster maintenance cycles and better upstream releases that benefit everyone.
Some big moves (likes switching to systemd) required some work, but still ran smoothly. For my own computers (including the laptop I work with) it's almost perfect.
Arch is far from perfect, and I'm not convinced I like the direction it's heading in (re systemd), but that's a plauge for the wider ecosystem than an Arch-specific issue. However Arch definitely find a nice balance between "hands on" and "lazy administration" for desktop users.
Sadly though, systemd was the last straw that saw the start of my migration away from Arch on the servers (now a balance of FreeBSD and Debian; depending on the requirements of that server).
As with everything though, it's all personal preference. So I expect plenty of people to have a different opinion (and different experiences as well).
YMMV of course but I've found the entire Arch experience to be pleasant and it fits my work flow, but I understand that it doesn't fit everyone's.