I guess I’m smart enough to install opensuse, but dumb enough that I somehow got slow pacman.

I kid you not, on my hardware zypper is the fastest between ubuntu apt, fedora dnf, and arch pacman. dnf was the second-fastest on my hardware, with apt and pacman being pretty sluggish

I’ve also used portage which was even slower, but probably not a fair comparison considering how much more complex it is.

One of the best apps on any platform

Somebody has never used opensuse. Zypper is an amazing package manager, one of the best on any distro.

It can handle flatpacks, native packages, and packages from the opensuse build system, keeping everything updated and organized.

Pacman is very basic by comparison, and a lot slower too in my experience.

I don’t hate systemd. However:

Units and service files are confusing, and the documentation could be a lot better.

That said, when systemd came out the traditional init stack was largely abandoned. Thanks to systemd (and the hatred of it) there are now a couple of traditional-style init systems in active development.