I'm a debian user, and I love the arch wiki. The debian wiki is often stale and/or incomplete, and usually you're told to go to the mailing lists (which are an awkward way to get info). The arch wiki is great at being clear and concise and I find arch's mediawiki to be more easily legible than debian's bare html.
I found Arch has quicker updates to the kernal and overall is super quick to adopt the latest tech. What made me completely switch to Arch for every day use, was the day the GTX 1080 came out, I could set it up on Arch with the beta drivers. If I wanted to do the same on Debian, I had to figure out how to update the kernal to a version not typically used, then find or figure out how to install the beta drivers, etc. Etc.
Debian is more stable, so when I need to do something where I don't need the latest drivers, I like to use it.
Typically, my servers, my company laptop(s), etc.
A common issue with Debian style distros is that you can install packages easily but it often comes with lots of configuration afterwards. It doesn't "just work"
AUR community scripts are like APT but for less popular programs that aren't supported in the main repos and, more importantly, packages that come with more complete installation scripts with necessary configs and supporting tooling.
Like any OSS community it's benefited most from a lively active community.
ArchLinux is easily the best experience you will find for desktop Linux usage. Plus the Wiki is the best around for Linux.
It's the only distro where using GRSecurity is as simple as installing a package. That's just not possible on Debian.
I'd still use Debian for servers as most VPS companies don't support ArchLinux natively, the set-up process for Arch is a bit intense, and if anyone else needs to get access it's better for portability.
- old arch single config file, with '@' syntax for parallelism got me hooked; sure it's different in systemd days
- early problem free systemd adoption
- simplified, close to upstream distribution (don't want to dig for src, dev, docs etc)
- their wiki is the one that speaks the most to my mind, I try to be gentle and objective, but every time, I find solutions in a short amount of time, and even more ideas. They hit a very very sweet spot to me. (gentoo was like that before the data loss)
- no installer, might seem stupid but it's a bit easier to reason with it; I don't have to learn an install framework, it's very bare and unixy.
- very thin tooling from arch, debian does a lot, but it's too heavy for my mind. Things might have changed since I last live in debian but I run a few debian live isos and derivatives and it always feels like "too much", administrative (as the debian documentation)
- rolling by default, debian has testing but it feels riskier
- AUR felt simpler (again) than custom apt repos
Also I might add that I distanced myself from the OS quest (or if I could I'd run a lisp or smalltalk fork or something similar). I'd be happy to hear your suggestions about my points if you have time for that.