It's not just snobbery, the project is poorly run in some ways. But if it works, it works, I won't tell you you shouldn't use it.

My bad experiences with it are mostly niche issues with a certain device they supported, and conflicts they had with open source devs about pulling in unreleased, untested code fixes early, causing tons of bogus bug reports to be filed back with the upstream developers, but having their SSL certificates expire repeatedly wasn't confidence inspiring either, and in the meantime arch had improved somewhat in user-friendliness.

Arch still has its flaws (not allowing ARM packages in their repos/AUR is the big one for me, that shit sucks), so I don't really have a horse in this race. on servers I've come around to liking debian a lot after some recent experiences, but I gotta admit having a polished UI out of the gate is nice and back in the day at least, I didn't get that with arch or debian.