I generally don't aggree with the "upstream" philosophy as well - or at least not to 100 %.

Bugs can (of course) be upstream bugs. As in other distributions, bugs SHOULD get fixed in arch. I'm not saying that the devs must fix bugs in the upstream distributions, but at least the bugs should be followed upstream, and if a patch is available fixing the problem - it should get fixed (patched) in arch as well.

Most of the problems in arch, like kernel performance regression problems with glx (bug #10328 in bugzilla.kernel.org, submitted in march - fixed in the 2.6.25.8 release which is 1 day old - 4 month at all) , gnome bugs, kio bugs in kde3, as well as many others have upstream fixes available. Due to the arch philosophy, they will never appear until they are available upstream. This saves a lot of time to the devs, of course. Thogh, waiting half a year for fixes can be annoying (or is annoying if they directly effect you).

The "don't use gnome" solution is NOT a solution at all. You get used to a desktop, used to a way of working and it's tools.You don't want to change desktop and play around if you want to get work done.

Since a long time, i recompile arch sources (in the same version as the one in the repos, including the revision number) with the according patches i personally need. That's not what it should be, and I had intentions to change to another system a quite long time ago - if i wouldn't need to change to BSD then, since Arch is the only linux I personally know with a BSD like RC style and /etc layout - which i like... and a quite good package management (i don't like rpm, and slacks tools - and don't know a similar .deb system), not saying I'd like to change to BSD (most likely causes troubles, at least as a C/C++ dev, I'm basically not a friend porting software i need or want to try. The better "community support" at least is available for linux.

Kind regards,
Georg