Fedora do seem [1] to make the same versions available. So there doesn't seem to be any' holding back' of unstable versions unless they decide to backport fixes from higher versions?

Fedora do work on six-month releases so there will be some version jumps between versions of Fedora but IIRC they will update little and often just like Arch whilst on a given release.

https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24...

I'm personally guessing it's not as much that the releases themselves were inherently buggy as much as some configuration was required to get it working correctly.

And Fedora shipped some configuration that worked for the standard environment you'd have when you just installed Fedora and didn't change things around too much. Since Arch encourages you to build your own setup and roll your own configs to a much larger degree, the defaults probably weren't quite right or quite enough for their specific setups.

I don't mean this in an "Arch bad, other distro good" sense, I just wanted to say I've seen the same thing where some detail in an Arch setup was broken. It's simply different strokes for different folks.