Arch is a better middle ground IMO.
I tried Arch and found the divide between distribution packages and AUR to be strange. I assume distribution packages are trustworthy, but a lot of things aren't available there, so you have to use AUR. But my understanding is that AUR is all user contributed and unvetted, so it's essentially like the olden days of downloading an exe and hoping for the best. Unless you go to the effort of scrutinizing every script, I guess.
Updates seem to be hit or miss too. I had some AUR packages that suddenly failed with circular dependency issues and later a full system update made the machine unbootable, which wasn't tons of fun. That's when I went back to Gentoo. :P
To be fair, though, I stopped using Arch after about a couple of months. I could be remembering things wildly incorrectly when it comes to the package management stuff. Unbootable update, though, I remember vividly!
I used Gentoo around 2002 or earlier and it was everytime an adventure to emerge anything, mostly due to the time it was taking. A kernel rebuild was taking hours.
I was not interested in fine-tuning the binaries so I was emerging with the default configuration, which makes it more or less equivalent to installing something from a repo.
The immense advantage of Gentoo is that you had to install it from the very scratch and it gave you finally an understanding of what was going on, instead of just next next next on install screens. I had everyone from my team go though an installation just for that.
> and found the divide between distribution packages and AUR to be strange
Wasn't this the same thing with Gentoo, where there would be "official" sources, and then the others. With colliding names? (it may have been another distro, sorry if this is the case - my memory is not that good 20 years back). I know that it took me a while to understand that philosophy (but again, maybe it was not Gentoo)
> To be fair, though, I stopped using Arch after about a couple of months.
After having had used Debian/Ubuntu for years on my server, I got fed up with the upgrade cycle and moved to Arch a year or so ago. I did not have any problems and the documentation is top notch. I use my server in a very basic way: an Arch installation, then docker and borg and this is pretty much it. Everything I run is in docker containers (except for borg (backup) for more or less sane reasons - probably less than more)