I think I started using it around 2012 ish because I was tired of reinstalling Fedora every six months for a new release.

I would say it takes me between a half hour to an hour to install, assuming I have a second computer to look at the install guide, but I've done it a few times and could probably just do it without if I had to. Might take slightly longer if you've never done it, or it might be way faster, if you just used the arch install script they have now, I have not tried doing that.

As for day to day use, mostly you just sudo pacman install something and it usually just works. You choose what to install so you choose what to run. Then maintenance wise you just pacman update and that's usually all you need.

It used to be more unstable and things needed tinkering after an update but that's not really been a problem for me in a few years. Mostly it's just a Linux install that feels like any other, to me.