In my own experience with Arch, things offered through AUR (while convenient) seem to cause more problems than that which is in core, extra, community, multilib, etc... In other words, things which pacman handles.
So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.
I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.
To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.
So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.
I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.
To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.