There's a lot of backstory here, that I'm going to ignore. This is not a rant, or a personal attack, or a justification. I want to explain the way I see things and where I want to take them.
When I began using Arch, we had the philosophy that we were "as vanilla as possible". This means that we trusted the upstream developers. If an Arch user wanted featureX, they contact the upstream developers, asked for featureX. Whatever upstream's decision, yes or no, we went along with it. We did NOT add the feature to our package anyway.
When I began using Arch, we had the philosophy in mind to "Keep It Simple, Stupid". This means that if things were too complex, we did it another way, or didn't do it ourselves. Someone wanted custom hardware modules? They could build them themselves.
When I began this all, we kept things as simple as we could, and allowed (and actually encouraged) people to change things they wanted to. This was the core of Arch - if you don't like it, do it yourself. We told people "If you don't like how the maintainer did that, use ABS and rebuild it". We told people, "If you want a package for that, make it yourself". We had users that knew this, and worked in tandem with us. Some users provided custom repos, different PKGBUILDs, alternatives.
This has all changed. For the worse. And it shows in the mentality of our patching. One user requests a feature, we apply a patch - we don't worry about upstream. One user has a brand-spanking new sound card, kernel gets patched. One user doesn't like a configure flag in a package, it gets changed.
We can't continue like this. Arch wasn't made to sustain itself in this way. Arch was made to work in tandem with the users - users that can help themselves AND us. Arch was made to work with you, not for you.