And I don't hear much complaints about the distro-patching from developers (exceptions: Jörg Schilling for example). A bit going further, I think that "patchability" is one of the main power of open source; and I see nothing wrong (fundamentally) in the common practice, that distros supply "mini-fork" packages to satisfy their users' taste in the heterogeneous linux community (some users like eye-candy others are minimalistic etc). Usually I enjoy _usable_ "vanilla" packages (that's why I am AL user).
Again, when there is a really unusable / broken package, it's very likely not because of the vanilla philosophy, but because of the lack of time of developers. And as far as I am concerned, Arch provides working packages, so I would say it's doing pretty well overall. There are probably exceptions that confirm the rule, but that's life, nothing is perfect :)
Yes, I would like to believe, that you are right here. But the mc bug I showed you was _closed_ by reasoning: 'Implemented/Merged upstream'. And the same reasoning for this: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5546 Bye