burning mod points for this...
The problem with Arch is that it got too popular, and the forums got overrun by people who wanted to be spoon fed. The devs got sick of being friendly and nice to people, and the more ignorant of the newbies who stuck around turned into something like
Gentoo ricers (note: I like Gentoo, and it's users, some very knowledgeable people on the mailing lists and forums). These days the Arch forums can get pretty hostile if you criticise Arch in any way, but it's because of the barrage of stupid posts the moderators had to deal with.
The devs do make one good point though, if users don't want to use systemd there needs to be a working alternative. A few Archers tried to do this, but it mostly ended up as talk, and descended into a flamewar.
rc.conf and the BSD style init* were two of the many things that attracted me to Arch, I don't like it's current direction, or dumping the install scripts, but there's nothing else that has the same configurability in a binary distribution, coupled with the AUR that interests me.
*I started on FreeBSD in 2001 and SuSE 8 shortly after. I've been using Arch on my computers since 2007.