I choose Arch for all my (real, not hosted) systems that I need to run (and not fail) on my home network. Raspberry pi for firewall/router, NAS backup, photo collection (all separate systems) ...
Keep an eye on the news, and if they tell you to upgrade a package, do it. KDE5 was a serious PITA , but that was for everybody, not just Arch. Gawd I hate KDE devs (photo collection, else I would bin KDE).
Arch itself is rock solid. pacman (package manager) is on a par with yum and apt - have a look at
this for a comparison. The Arch doco is unmatched - end of discussion.
Didn't answer the "time sink" issue. I kick off an update when I feel like it, rarely (never) have to follow up. No worse than Fedora/Mint/... whatever.