This amuses me, since I literally went from Gentoo to Arch because it felt like the same bleeding edge distro without having to wait for the compile time for half of the packages.

That said, I generally don’t recommend Arch (or Gentoo) to newbies. It’s great when it works, but the number of times I’ve had to troubleshoot some random dependency issue because I took more than a week to update my system would scare any newbie away. It’s a bit like the parable of the cobbler’s kids having the worst shoes, or the mechanic always driving a project car - when you have the skills to fix something, you’re willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that a normal person wouldn’t.

Some companies will make special versions for Black Friday that do indeed have cheaper parts or missing features, but for many it’s the exact same product as the normal SKU. They do the special SKU at the request of the retailer, to guarantee that no one can use a “price match guarantee” to make them sell more than the planned quantity of door busters.