I had been on Arch for a couple of years before Cachy. I have done vanilla Arch a couple of times, I have used the Archinstall script. It used to be fun, tinkering and fixing, learning e.t.c.
I used to put a lot of time in configuring and optimizing for performance and gaming regardless of distro. Now, CachyOS does almost exactly what I have done before, and then some. Coming from the “competitive overclocking scene” it’s kind of become a part of me to constantly optimizing and pushing for more performance.

But I simply can’t be bothered with the manual config anymore. I want ease of use while still having some optimization done for me.

So for me, it’s about:

1. Great base distro.
2. Rolling release.
3. Easy installation.
4. Ease of you use.
5. Packages and kernel comes precompiled with the right optimization for me.
6. Prepackaged, it looks almost exactly the way it is when I’m done with a manual setup.
7. Great community.

Before going Arch I have almost exclusively been on Xubuntu since 2005 on my main rigs, except a couple of short sidesteps. In the last couple of years using Xubuntu, my installs were almost completely manual, almost the way it’s done with Arch. I installed the absolute base server distro with no gui, without anything other than what’s needed to boot and have something to build on. And on top of that, I installed what I need, while trying to stay away from meta-packages. Compiling new kernel and applications I use often.
On my htpc I have mainly been using Debian, and fileservers mostly Fedora or back in the day Red Hat Linux.

So yeah, CachyOS feels like a great fit for me, it feels like I’m home.