[deelowe]

I'm not a huge fan of recommending yaourt. Users should really learn more about the AUR before just letting yaourt automate it all. I recommend cower until you get the hang of things (or maybe just use cower full time). Cower automates only the downloads and updates without completely abstracting everything away with regards to the build and install process.

[zanny]

Unless you use Antergos you need to at least manually build yaourt and its AUR dependencies once.

also, you can imitate yaourt with literally wget <pkgbuild> makepkg pacman -U <pkg>. There isn't a lot of secret sauce to take out of your life by automating those steps after you do it once or twice.

[semi-extrinsic]

One word: dependencies. Of AUR packages on other AUR packages, in an unbalanced tree three-four levels deep. That's why most people use AUR helpers.

[GutenYe]

In case you haven't tried pacaur, you should give pacuar a try. From my experience, pacaur is better than yaourt.

pacaur: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacaur

[FreeFull]

Some AUR packages won't build with yaourt for some reason too, in which case you still have to use cower or download them from the website, and run makepkg yourself.

[dgeex]

I didn't know about cower. Probably should give it a try. Thanks for the idea.