It's been ~11 years since I used a distro based on pacman as a daily driver, and I was very harsh on pacman at the time. It seemed to lag behind the high-level package management tools of contemporaneous distros in terms of flexibility (and, once you had a lot of things installed, performance).

But I never, ever had it just fail to install a package, and I don't remember much fuss with dependency resolution taking manual fiddling, either.

I'd love to hear your pacman horror stories; gimme the hot package manager gossip :D