[rcxdude]

Yeah, it's a balancing act, and it's best when the users and maintainers are on the same page: I don't like maintainers futzing about with packages to fit to arbitrary standards (debian can be quite bad here, and the general policy of 'as close to as vanilla as possible' is something I like about arch), but on the other hand it's much appreciated when packages come with fixes for bad upstream decisions (of which there are many examples), or even important features which upstream has sat on for years (see pulseaudio support for high-quality bluetooth codecs for an example which eventually led to the patch author rage-quitting the project because they strung him along for years). As a user I'm generally happiest when I get the software with the features I want without the bugs which cause me trouble, and it's situation dependent whether the packager or upstream are working against me on that. Usually the biggest source of friction is who actually winds up supporting the result: for all that distros may encourage filing bugs on their own tracker usually users wind up going to upstream for support, even if the issue is caused by the distro's patches. Some badly behaving maintainers (and it sounds like manjaro have been far too aggressive in trying to pull in new features) have I think caused a general pushback from upstream developers as they wind up with a bunch of support requests from someone else's screw-up (see for example home-assistant's attitude to anyone else distributing their software).