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Have you found a difference in freshness of packages since you switched? I really like how in Arch packages tend to be much more up to date than other distros ( a side effect of the rolling release)

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Gentoo had slightly fresher packages (I was running ~x86). But, arch packages are in principle more stable. I haven't had any major breakage with Arch for a few years now, while with Gentoo it was a norm to have breakages every month until I finally switched off.

I was under the impression that the situation was reversed. My Gentoo systems have been very stable because I take many of the masked package guidelines seriously (of course not all). Meanwhile you have Arch that changed the default python version to 3 back in October 2010 that hosed a lot of people's systems. Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808840 and my favorite quote (there are so many great ones though) from the mess:

20:20 <dash> well that confirms my impression that arch was invented by a bunch of guys who thought gentoo was too stable and easy to use

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