On the bright side you can get quite far without the AUR.

I have 1,135 packages installed. Only 3 top level packages are from the AUR and 2 of those 3 are from the same author, they just happened to split their packages into a client / server architecture.

This is similar to my situation with Gentoo. Across my Gentoo systems, I have exactly one package installed from an "overlay" [0], and that's Steam. Everything else is straight out of the official package tree.

[0] ...which is -IIRC- Gentoo's term for a user-provided and entirely-unvetted collection of packages...