>I also see it to arch's credit that I was able to do such horrific things to it with such ease (and fairly good documentation).
This is the key differentiator between Arch and other distros (particularly, Debian): Arch wins when the user wants to modify the system in ways not intended by the maintainers of the distro. In contrast, Debian wins against Arch when the user never does anything that the maintainers of the distro did not anticipate that users would do. (Debian wins here because changes have gone through vastly more real-world testing and bug-fixing before hitting Debian stable than they have gone through before hitting the machine of the Arch user. Note that there is no stable version of Arch Linux.)
This is the key differentiator between Arch and other distros (particularly, Debian): Arch wins when the user wants to modify the system in ways not intended by the maintainers of the distro. In contrast, Debian wins against Arch when the user never does anything that the maintainers of the distro did not anticipate that users would do. (Debian wins here because changes have gone through vastly more real-world testing and bug-fixing before hitting Debian stable than they have gone through before hitting the machine of the Arch user. Note that there is no stable version of Arch Linux.)