I'm not trying to bash Arch, but it never looked like a particularly security-conscious or focused distro. To me it looked like it's about being cool and bleed

I'm not trying to bash Arch, but it never looked like a particularly security-conscious or focused distro. To me it looked like it's about being cool and bleeding edge and Gentoo with binary packages... and I have a faint recollection of seeing some rather unimpressive packaging, though that was long time ago. So it runs on i686 and amd64 only. How do you select "good" hardware?