The AUR really is night and day compared to other package managers. Official packages get updates FAST, user packages typically not much slower.

Issues with new versions get immediate solutions on the forums, so breaking changes hardly impact you if you just check the front page of the forums when they do happen.

Arch has the reputation of being the hardcore distro, but really its so user friendly to manage after the initial setup (and I think they have an "easy" setup process if you don't want to manually configure everything now).