I've been using Arch for a long time now and I really think it is a fantastic distro. It requires a little more knowledge than some others such as Mint/fedora etc. but this means that you learn a lot whilst you're getting everything sorted. The documentation is extremely well written and I've always found it easy to follow, and there is a great community who are very friendly to new starters. I like the fact that you chose precisely what goes into your system, so you can have gnome, kde, openbox... the list is endless. From a development point of view the speed at which packages are updated is fantastic, meaning that you're always using the latest versions.
I started with Lubuntu before moving to Crunchbang. I wanted to use Arch immediately, and after practicing a bit I was able to get it to work, albeit the wifi was finicky. So I went with Crunchbang eventually and stuck with that for about a year. Once I heard the news Crunchbang was losing support, I took that as a sign that the time had come to switch over to Arch Linux like I'd always wanted to do. The install isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be. It's a little daunting at first having to physically build and make your own partitions and file systems, but once you're over the hump, it makes sense, and you have a completely empty system to build on top of. After fiddling a while with getting xmonad and xmobar with custom scripts to display my wifi, volume, and battery levels, as well as showing the current artist and song through MPD while it's playing, I've finally got a computer that's completely my own, and runs lighter than anything else I could throw at it. All of that and the wonderful pacman package manager, and I couldn't want anything else. Arch is a great distro, and I've yet to worry about any major breakages from any updates. Granted, if you're wanting to update your system once every few months, Arch probably isn't for you, as taking such a long time is liable to create some problems from broken dependencies. But if you're fine with throwing a quick pacman -Syu every few days to a week, you should be just fine.