I've been a debian user for about three years now. Lately, I got somewhat settled, since most of the things in my distribution were not new anymore, thus I was not learning that much anymore. Arch seemed a good possibility. I installed it in a virtual machine to code really simple 'hello world' kernel modules, and I liked it very much. It is a barebone installation and gives me the feeling to be in control. I think I'd use arch as a server distribution, since I haven't had any problems with the latest packages. Maybe my opinion will change, and maybe I'd prefer something more stable in a server...
Anyway, I respect the opinion of the author, but it sounds a bit overdramatic to me. Tough were the days of winmoden + slackware... tears falling