And that kind of operation could be automated - its just a pacman -U on the old version and append into pacman.conf on the IgnorePkg line.
And nothing really stops you from having, with pacman, repos the way Ubuntu does - because really, its not that security and feature updates are hugely segregated - they usually are just a boolean in the package description. What happens is they have repositories of software they will not update with feature releases but instead only ship bugfix and security patches for, and they just call them jesse / wheezy / vivid / wiley etc. You could use pacman for the same end, making a repository of software you don't push feature changes to but just push bugfixes in, and again replace Archs repos.
The point I'm trying to make is there is a distinction between Archlinux the repository and Pacman the package manager. You can get around a lot of the unfavorable aspects of how Arch does packaging by doing it yourself. Of course it makes no sense to actually do that when Debian, CentOS, and Ubuntu LTS exist to do that exact same job without all the work, but it isn't because pacman is crippled in one aspect of package management to such a degree its unusable for that purpose.