I like Arch as a whole but I've found that for my purposes it is a time sink compared to Debian for example.
Debian has lots of sensible well thought out defaults. Arch has lots of disparate defaults each provided by the package vendor (as they don't customise packages).
It's not a criticism, but a difference to bear in mind.
That was my experience too. I switched to Debian from Arch a half year ago or so and I've spent far less time maintaining it; and once I'm used to "the Debian way" I can navigate new packages without having to think about it. And updates don't break my system or fail to deploy, and 'python' isn't a symlink for 'python3.2'.
I also reported a major security vulnerability in the default configuration of an Arch package but I had to reopen it because the maintainer said something stupid like "people who install this package should operate on trusted networks". What?
This is a great comment and the key phrase is "for my purposes..."
Many people look at a particular OS, decide that it's not right for what they need or want, and jump straight to "that OS sucks because it doesn't meet my needs." It should be fairly obvious how that is just a silly thing to think.
Different OSs meet different needs. We should strive to understand our own needs and to understand our options so we can make the optimal choice for our particular situation.
As an arch user myself, I like (and can afford the time) to tweak and fiddle with my setup so that it's just right for my workflow. Another reason I use it, is that it's a great way to learn more about linux.
Arch probably is not right for people who need lots of stability or don't have the time to fiddle and tweak the OS. And that's ok. There are many other options they can use. It sounds like Debian is the right fit for you and that's awesome.
Glancing through the instructions, it looks like things might have got better than when I installed arch linux around 6 months ago. At the point I felt like installation involved a lot of carefully designed "busy work", which I couldn't imagine not wanting to do, but which had to be done exactly.
The reason I left is because of their incredibly bizarre choice to make /usr/bin/python run python3, and messing headers around so much you couldn't build gcc from source. Between these two features, it made the system basically unusable for me.
Debian has lots of sensible well thought out defaults. Arch has lots of disparate defaults each provided by the package vendor (as they don't customise packages).
It's not a criticism, but a difference to bear in mind.