This is very true, though I personally think a good solid base is needed for anything that builds on it. It is also true, that there are some things that would be needed asap, like the usable touchscreen UI. This however is a difficult task, as long as I'm in this alone.

I've actually thought for a while whether I should move my contribs to that Debian rebase project and/or Mer. Anyway, keeping with Arch ARM means that the packages we want to optimize, need to be separately maintained, with their respective dependencies. Some of these are widely used libraries, some require patching, some need rebuilding against rebuilt libraries etc. This makes maintaining everything a task so tedious, that from my point of view it would be easier to maintain own repository, which would also give us the benefit of _fully_ cortex-a8 optimized system. Using snapshots from a rolling release base would also give a small team time to adapt to changes that would normally break something (like custom packages now).

To name a few packages that would need to be rebuilt and/or separately maintained:

Mesa
Pulseaudio
libpng and similar
zlib and similar
everything with egl/gles disabled, like cogl
pixman, cairo, pango...

My thoughts exactly. Concentrating on one (excellent) choice would be beneficial to everyone, even though it might limit the concept of choice. If we go so far that we begin to construct our own UI based on what already exists, that would truly benefit everyone. I think this combination is the best option to go with out of the choices we currently have. Assuming we get it to work