A little of column A, a little of column B. Arch is very much a distro developed for the packagers. OTOH, as someone who often has to dive into the details regardless of distro, I generally appreciate the plain-vanilla approach to arch's packaging (since I can just set the package up as opposed to undoing whatever helpful defaults and changes Debian's decided to add).

I personally (using Arch, btw) definitely prefer Arch's behaviour. If I update or install a daemon, I generally want to configure it before (re)starting it.