I can't my system because of this error:

Note that in the beginning, it asks:

There are so many updates by now that the list fills in a few pages in the terminal!

Also, I wonder why so many Arch updates get stuck or broken compared to almost any other distro? Is it poorly designed packages? Is it a design flaw in pacman/the package format?

oh
just delete
/lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin

and rerun the install
thats what did
maybe backup the original just in case

cp - /lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin /lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin-orig

Are you sure it won't harm anything — I'm using the xf86-video-ati driver?

well
in making my nfluxos for arch I kept running into same issue
not specific to yours except xf86-video-vmware crashes X if trying to use
X -configure

and no if you back it up and then try it
I have deleted stuff accidently too without backing up
like I deleted /usr/share/locale !?
and so I had to do

pacman -S base

to reinstall it

yeah, jsut reinstall whatever if it doesn't work
back it up
cp -r /lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin /lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin-orig
delete old one
rm -r /lib/firmware/radeon/R700_rlc.bin

then reinstall or upgrade

pacman -S xf86-video-ati
I usually let pacman do whatever it thinks is best...
Replace kernel26-firmware with core/linux-firmware? [Y/n] Y
for me

It worked.

I rebooted just to be sure it all works, and because the kernel and KDE got updated.

Still, why are so many Arch Linux updates broken?

Arch is mostly NOT broken----but the kind of issue that you have had does happen.

Only recently, I started digging more into how to avoid trouble. First, the Arch people say: NEVER install without doing a full upgrade first. Second is the admonition to always do "pacman -Syy" before anything else. What this does is force an update of the local database, even if the system **thinks** it's up to date.

It's also probably a good idea to purge the local cache periodically. This way, pacman is force to go to the repo and get the right version of something.

And, have you run the repository optimizer? (I forget the correct name, but it's on the wiki.)

PS: This came up in another thread. The "repository optimizer" is called "rankmirrors".

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