> I usually hear nice things about Arch

That's because you're hanging out with too many Gentoo users.

The Arch Way[1] is stupid. Less broadly, it's a poor, knee-jerk reaction to Debian maintainers' over-zealous patching of software. Trusting upstream software maintainers to properly tag "stable" releases (which means something different for everyone) and to work with the rest of the software in the system is a mistake. Also, that's the entire point of package maintainers maintaining repositories.

But that's OK. Something went wrong (again)? Just downgrade[2]!

1. Hope that the old package is in your cache

2. Hope that some repo mirror is out of date

3. Profit???

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way

[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages#Fi...