Arch is far from minimal. It literally ships systemd, and all kernel options enabled. Not to mention glibc, and a shitton of other crap...
I'm curious about which use cases wasn't supported for you, why it was an uphill battle and which derivative addressed them. I don't quickly see what would give you issues at first glance.
One derivative would be https://web.obarun.org , another one https://artixlinux.org