so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
From anecdotal experience I can only tell you that not once have I witnessed a showstopper bug on Arch. I recommend using btrfs and snapshots to really make sure however.
Arch pushes updates as they come with not much testing. This means you need to read before updating as it can break things. Pacman is also very fast at the cost of stability and ease of fixing
And yet I never do and it hardly ever does. And if it does, it's more often than not application specific and fixed by loading a snapshot and updating again after a week or so, which is next to 0 effort.