Depends on what you are planning to do. My PC is running Arch, after trying: Mandriva (or was i Mandrake ? it was years ago) which were very unstable for me, Ubuntu always go in my way, Debian was rock solid but too old, Gentoo was amazing, but compile times took to long. Arch gives me the freedom to setup my machine as I want it, doesn't get in my way, no need to upgrade every two years and frankly, it's more stable (as in, doesn't crash and burn, not APIs) then Ubuntu. My personal server run with Debian, which is very stable. The exception is minimal KVM server, then Arch is acceptable, as long as it's not a commercial KVM server.
I also run Arch, after trying many different distributions. I agree with the negative aspects of each distribution you outlined. Additionally to your comment I would like to emphasize some of the most important advantages of using Arch: * No unwanted bloatware * Exceptional and comprehensive wiki: Almost every problem I ever encountered could be solved by following steps of the archwiki * AUR (Arch User Repository): Provides almost every unofficial package I ever needed. Usually it is well maintained, but packages may require some minor modification. However I still find this to be less effort than building packages manually Still, for my servers I prefer Ubuntu/Debian for stability and ease of setup. Also, for some of my family and friends, who do not really care what operating system they use, I used to install Linux Mint. Most of them are not too proficient with using computers, but they actually find it easier to use Linux Mint than using Windows. In addition they do not seem to accidentally break their installation as frequently as they "broke" Windows. I should also note that I have nothing against using Windows as a operating system. I only preferred Linux Mint for easier maintenance.
Your points on Arch are spot on, but I think that they are the topping of the cake. I have a lot against Windows, the system is unstable, bloated and lacking at the same time*, the system is insecure, bad update mechanism (rebooting after every update ? taking hours to reboot after some updates), the system is very closed - you can't configure it to your liking, as it's not FOSS you can't see how it works. I'm not installing Linux for people, if you can't read the instructions to install one newbies friendly distributions I don't want you asking for my support. But for friends that do use Linux, helping them is easy, I can just give them one-two command lines. Unlike Windows where you need to guide their mouse to the icon that looks like a ... I did break my rule once, a person that needed help got Windows tech support from me (reinstalling the printer's driver, removing the new million of tool bars that installed them self into IE, removing viruses, etc...) on a weekly basis. Once he had Linux, it stopped, he could just use the computer and everything just kept working. Not installing Linux now days and not giving Windows tech support. * A clean installation of Windows 7 is taking over 20GB after updates, for this waste of space you are left with a horrible browser, no office software, no good shell, the WM is very lacking, etc...