[coldblues]

>but, I've personally found that nothing destabilizes my system like adding a bunch of software from outside the package manager

That's why you should be creating your own PKGBUILD.

[bcrescimanno]

It's so rarely an issue on Arch. Between the massive official repos and the incredibly comprehensive AUR, I've only needed to do it a couple of times.

My initial comment was about needing to do that on non-arch systems. I've created my own RPM and DEB packages in the past as well; but, at least when I did it years ago, it wasn't as effective as a PKGBUILD on arch.