I concur. Arch is an easy way to learn linux from a services and utilities point of view. I am somewhat skeptical still about the value of LFS (from a services point of view). Too much time is spent in the build cycle. You will understand how to compile things, but you don't get enough "trigger-time" on the important day-to-day services that most people expect to run. I ran Arch on a laptop and on a workstation while managing about 200 windows servers. Get remote desktop client installed, samba, and you are good to go! (all automation happened on the automation server)

I remember the dark days; the gentoo wiki crashed and burned. Arch took up the slack for a time, several weeks in fact, before the gentoo team could restore most of what they had.