You're describing exactly the Arch Philosophy though, not constantly broken mind you, but as vanilla (close to upstream) as possible. It's not supposed to be an "out of the box" distro at all, as in everything works out of the box.

When you sign up to Arch, yeah I think you sign up for a lot of tweaking that would be done for you already. Luckily there is the excellent Arch Wiki to hold your hand through much of it.