Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There's a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don't even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don't understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don't even know what bloat means if you can't set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don't matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we'll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don't use arch repos break the aur, so you don't even have the one thing you want from arch)
Arch doesn't require you to "read through all changelogs". It only requires that you check the news. News posts are rare, their text is short, and not all news posts are about you needing to do something to upgrade the system. Additionally, pacman wrappers like
parucheck the news automatically and print them to the terminal before upgrading the system. So it's not like you have to even remember it and open a browser to do it.No, it's not. None of the things that make Arch hard for newbies have to do anything with the bleeding edge aspect of Arch. Arch does not assume your use case and will leave it up to you to do stuff like edit the default configuration and enable a service. In case of errors or potential breakage you get an error or a warning and you deal with it as you see fit. These design choices have nothing to do with "moving fast". It's all about simplicity and a diy approach to setting up a system.