I recently switched from Arch Linux to Debian mainly due to the hard systemd requirement. I hope the Debian transition will be better than what Arch Linux did.
Haven't heard about lot of users complaining about the way Arch developers did it. In fact I think it works flawlessly.
It hosed my machine. The problem was I hadn't upgraded in a while, so when I did upgrade some of the hacks they had in place to upgrade seamlessly no longer worked due to library incompatibilities. Even the Arch IRC channel couldn't help :(
I understand. Well, at least they did it early. It shouldn't happen once again.