But on the other hand, Pine devices have severely lacked for being able to tell users what the best place to start is. I've wanted to back to my PinePhone a few times and had to ask, like, what is in the best state to use, and nobody could tell me.
Updating my PineBook Pro took a ton of investigating because the simple explanation of how to get from what mine shipped with to what new ones shipped with was hard to find, discussion of what mine shipped with was nearly gone already, and the process for upgrading it also had since changed!
As someone who doesn't build distros, your post is actually really nice for me, now I know I should just install Manjaro on my Pine devices! About time they picked something.
I am not qualified to have strong opinions about particular distros, but I think Pine is extremely overdue for a defined reference implementation.
The diversity of the distributions has helped me _a lot_ to make sure that Megapixels does not have some flaws in it that makes it unable to run on other platforms. Things like musl/glibc differences, weird path requirements in nixOS all have made the actual software better.
If "the golden standard" is the manjaro distro then the requirements for good software plummet really hard because there's no quality standard at all there.