I used Archlinux a while back. That was back when i was still a Unix toddler (not that I've matured very well since then). I actually had fun with it.
Try living out of a TTY for about a month. You will come out with rustic beard, red eyes and a triumphant smile. No Gnome or gdm, screen to take care of your "windows", mpd (ncmpc) to play your music, elinks to browse the web, surfraw to search, vi to edit your files, irssi for irc, bitlbee for msn etc. Control your daemons with rc.conf and begin your journey :)