While technical debate can be productive when it's not simply rehasing the same things over and over again, simply voicing opinions is not. I don't think it would be a good idea to develop any distribution based upon the opinions of whoever shouts the loudest. Decisions are made based on consensus among the people doing the work whether they are Arch developers, trusted users or other contributors in the community without those fancy titles. Arch isn't striving for popularity so the popularity of the decisions among the users isn't important. It's developed for the people doing the work. I interpreted this thread as a bug report with 'The Arch Way' page on the wiki so it hasn't been for naught. That page has been rewritten to better reflect what has always been the development philosophy instead of being a vague advertisement for the distribution with questionable claims. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way It's not perfect, but it's a lot more grounded in reality now.