The only issue I had with this setup was that if a download got cancelled, it would start failing throwing package integrity errors because aria downloads direc

The only issue I had with this setup was that if a download got cancelled, it would start failing throwing package integrity errors because aria downloads directly to /var/cache/pacman/pkg/package_name.tar.xz rather than a .part file which is copied upon completion. The built-in downloader of pacman ensures this is done right.