I respect the hell out of Debian and am grateful for everything they do for the larger ecosystem, but this is why I use Arch. It's so much easier just to refer to the official documentation for the software and know it will be correct. Also, I've never really encountered a situation where interop between software is broken by just sticking to vanilla upstream. Seems like modifying upstream is just a ton of work with so many potential breakages and downsides it's not really worth it.
You seem to be implying that Debian makes large significant changes to upstream software for the sake of integration with the rest of the OS and that Arch makes none at all. Neither of these is true.
Also if that means the program won't run at all? Or a bug that has a patch to fix it doesn't get fixed? Or a device that could be supported is instead not supported?
I've made patches to a bunch of stuff to improve kde on mobile/tablets. After short or very long time they do get merged, but meanwhile people (like me) who own a tablet can actually use the software.
