@greypilgrim @janci First off, a thick skin to deal with mean users
@greypilgrim @janci Serious answer: I maintained minor packages in Fedora and Ubuntu. Pacman doesn't seem harder.
The hard problem with maintaining core distro packages is testing and interacting with upstream to get patches for specific blockers.
A smart maintainer with little free time won't deviate too far from how major distros configure and install the toolchain.