Commenting on your enumerated arguments:
1. Isn't it just psychological? Most people want new and shiny things just
because it is new and shiny, even if functionality is the same. I use
Trisquel because it works and has been long working. I had Parabola on this
laptop before but with the switch to systemd (I think it was because of that)
wireless was not functional anymore. I could not get it working again and
reinstalled Trisquel back. Parabola also has a bug in installation that makes
initcpio fail (at least for me) so you have to reboot to a live cd and chroot
it and do it manually. By the way, my brother still uses Ubuntu 9.04 today
just because it works even if it is long dead.
2. I can understand this one as I feel the same. I like to keep a clean and
concise partition table.
3. Pacman is not *that* different from a managing perspective. I like the -Rs
switch which I did not find an alternative in apt, and the ability to see
packages installed by pacman -U separately of those from the repository. I
don't think it's worth a switch because of that though.
