"Arch-diehards - why shouldn't I just use Manjaro and instead keep it strictly Arch?"
Because Manjaro isn't Arch. It maintains its own repositories with the attendant risks, for whatever that's worth. Also, my anecdote is that I tried it and its default XFCE desktop did weird things. I don't have much patience for spin-off distros that don't work as well as their parents so rather than try and figure out what weird thing Manjaro is doing differently, I just threw my hands up and installed Arch with its perfectly functional (if not as pretty) XFCE.
You came from Arch. You went to Gentoo. You're thinking about going to Debian. So you have a lot of experience with rolling-release distros and you're thinking of going to a scheduled-release distro. That's something worth thinking about. If you go from Gentoo to Debian you will be downgrading a lot of your software. Make sure there aren't any features you're currently using that don't exist in the older version or get ready to manually shoehorn in a newer version and hope nothing breaks. Also, be aware that the apt and dnf package managers in Debian and Fedora do a lot more hand-holding than pacman or emerge. IMHO they're overly complicated and try to do too much and as a result they're relatively easy to break. Just interrupt dpkg and have fun with dpkg-reconfigure. (actually, i don't know if that's still a thing -- it's been a long time since i broke dpkg)
Anyway, that's my perspective, maybe you'll find it useful :)
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"Arch-diehards - why shouldn't I just use Manjaro and instead keep it strictly Arch?"
Because Manjaro isn't Arch. It maintains its own repositories with the attendant risks, for whatever that's worth. Also, my anecdote is that I tried it and its default XFCE desktop did weird things. I don't have much patience for spin-off distros that don't work as well as their parents so rather than try and figure out what weird thing Manjaro is doing differently, I just threw my hands up and installed Arch with its perfectly functional (if not as pretty) XFCE.
You came from Arch. You went to Gentoo. You're thinking about going to Debian. So you have a lot of experience with rolling-release distros and you're thinking of going to a scheduled-release distro. That's something worth thinking about. If you go from Gentoo to Debian you will be downgrading a lot of your software. Make sure there aren't any features you're currently using that don't exist in the older version or get ready to manually shoehorn in a newer version and hope nothing breaks. Also, be aware that the apt and dnf package managers in Debian and Fedora do a lot more hand-holding than pacman or emerge. IMHO they're overly complicated and try to do too much and as a result they're relatively easy to break. Just interrupt dpkg and have fun with dpkg-reconfigure. (actually, i don't know if that's still a thing -- it's been a long time since i broke dpkg)
Anyway, that's my perspective, maybe you'll find it useful :)