These aren't problems to that community, it's a difference in goals. Ease of use and simplicity are very often trade-offs.
I use Arch at home and Ubuntu servers and containers at work. Ubuntu auto-detects and auto-configures much more than Arch does but that last 10% can be a hell of fight with Ubuntu due to the added complexity.
I followed a similar path. I love Arch but in terms of reliability I don't trust that I'll have a workable system at an arbitrary time. Manjaro is a good compromise between Arch and Ubuntu goals I believe: it works with a well rounded desktop environment on top of Arch out of the box and there wasn't much to rip out off the fresh install.
I've had several (non technical) friends report basically no issues on either install process or daily use. Not to go all fanboy on this thread but that distro restored my faith in using linux on a general use laptop.
As long as you don't update at random times, the "workability" should be very predictable. And breaks on updates have become extremely rare for me, although of course it depends on your packages and configuration.
What Manjaro did for Arch, Calculate did for Gentoo. I don't even mind the occasional package compile, as most is binary-based, and everything just works.
I'm dumping Ubuntu. They think that all these churning changes are improvements and they are too swayed by their own intellectual arguments as Engineers. If you look at history, Windows overtook Apple when Apple broke compatibility to improve their product (most people have forgotten that at one time Apple was ahead of Windows in the PC world - and many thought that Windows didn't stand a chance.) Even great product changes have a cost - and they don't seem to understand that.
Ubuntu will still be very compatible with Debian, which provides second-only-to-Redhat levels of compatibility and package availability. The problem is their internal application ecosystem; instead of contributing Wayland and GNOME/KDE, they decided to reinvent the wheel. Yes, they have Samsung and other corporations on-board to support their vision, but it doesn't contribute to Linux/GNU overall.
I dumped Ubuntu when the Unity Netbook Edition switched from the (beautiful) EFL libraries to Qt, which added significant performance penalties, and then the main distro adopted the new interface. It felt like everything could've been built upon Plasma 5, but because it wasn't controlled by them, they had to make their own in order to be XKCD-927 Compliant.
