[arch-general] Ignoring packages and piecemeal updates

Hi archers, It has been repeated a lot of times that doing piecemeal updates with pacman -Sy pkgname is not a very good idea. What about ignoring packages? Is it as dangerous? And a more general question: is it even theoretically possible to have a bleeding edge distro with piecemeal updates and with no required manual intervention during updates or is it just a pipe dream? Best, Denis.