The only update from Arch that has bricked my system was when they reconfigured the whole file system, to unify things (as opposed to it being split up between

The only update from Arch that has bricked my system was when they reconfigured the whole file system, to unify things (as opposed to it being split up between {/usr{/local,},}/bin) -- that was a nasty shock. In all my years of using Arch (I switched from Gentoo in 2010), I've really had very few problems. It's a very friendly yet powerful and customizable distribution, in my estimation.