From a user point of view, how would you notice this "amazingness"? Having used yum, dnf, zypper, apt-get, apt, emerge and also pacman for a while I only saw very superficial differences and maybe formatting. (packaging is different,yes, but usage? Also speed is apples to oranges and "pretty" output I don't really care for.)

> no bloat at all.

_Any distro_ does that. Either use the netinstall or open the archinstall guide and replace pacstrap by debootstrap. Heck, for opensuse you even get the full package manager during installation and can select/deselect any package you want. How is arch any different?

> surprisingly stable, though you should be careful before you upgrade.

So much less stable than, say, debian testing.