Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see what you mean, and I agree with you in theory. The long learning curve and installation time for Arch was a non-starter for me though. Back to your point, Manjaro runs directly on pacman repos, not a layer between it and upstream. It just comes with IMO sane defaults and an installer GUI.
When did you try Arch? With the adoption of systemd it's incredibly easy to configure if you aim for a simple no desktop enviroment setup or something minimal. If not, I think it doesn't make any sense to use it unless you are a seasoned user. Rolling release will make running big frameworks like KDE tricky, as things will change often. And unless you have set everything up yourself, you won't know where to look in o…
On the contrary, you get new releases (with bugfixes) much sooner.