Weirdly I've found the opposite to be true when comparing Debian's command line package tools with pacman. I've found pacman to be much more powerful and cleane

Weirdly I've found the opposite to be true when comparing Debian's command line package tools with pacman. I've found pacman to be much more powerful and cleaner to use. Granted some stuff is a little more hands on rather than things silently working in the background. But pacman's query tools are light years ahead of apt and that really makes the difference when needing to do complicated updates like the stuff you mentioned. Agreed about regression though, that's one of the issues of running a bleeding edge distro though, which most Debian-based distros are not. The general advice is to check ArchLinux's news page before running system updates. Personally I rarely bother as I have a ZFS root so I just create rollback points - a little like Windows Restore, but at the filesystem level so super quick.