Thank goodness. There is no other free Linux distro out there which gives the benefits of both a stable release with great support for most of the latest hardware AND rapid package/kernel updates (approaching a rolling release). This must not be easy since its so rare. Whatever they are doing regarding maintainership is working very well from what I can tell.

This has nothing to do with that. They could absolutely make it easier for new people without harming their quality. For God's sake just better documentation would help, and I don't see how they're going to lose hardware support because they wrote one canonical page with all the info you need. The process should be more of a checklist to complete, and less of post-crime forensic investigation where tons of details and tips are missing and people have to draw flow charts and hunt for missing information just to figure out what the next step should be. Your reply is a (very) shallow dismissal of an actual issue and (assuming you're not alone) probably the reason this is such a problem in the first place.

What a strange POV. "Thank goodness x and y are blocked off."

Now make the same argument for proprietary software. "Thank goodness x or y don't allow just randos to touch their source code and make PRs. That'd be DISASTROUS!"

Maybe it is shortsighted in the long run? We'll see. I'm glad that we have choices -- AUR on one hand, Fedora on the other (and Debian, Alpine, etc)