>Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of users moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever.

Yes, but it will be experience they inevitably will have once these differences will result in their OS being fundamentally broken and nobody being there to help them.

>It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".

Hilariously giving people a fundamentally broken OS, which they use based on superficial criteria is the best gatekeeper imaginable. Once the inevitable happens and their distro is totally trashed, they will never use Linux for anything again.

If you want people to have a good long term experience give them a well supported mainstream distro, instead of a fundamentally broken arch patchset.

>"actually, maybe this is something I can use".

Which is exactly the wrong thought. No, the fundamentally broken Arch derivative you are trying to use is much, much harder to use than Fedora.

But you won't get them to understand these points unless you're willing to fix the image problem and then invest in better branding. Telling people they're wrong doesn't sell things.