I have reason to believe a package I use (python-polib) was moved from the aur to the official extra repo. I'm now having trouble getting it installed.
absolutely. i've tried this on two x86 systems as well, my desktop and laptop. if there's no quick fix or obvious problem, i'm not above doing a full reinstall to fix this.
I suppose you could also clean out cached packages with pacman -Scc and then delete the package database files in /var/lib/pacman/sync so that you know for a fact that you are getting a fresh sync and it not depending on anything cached.
yep, dns points me to 108.61.5.83 and i can get there by hostname and address thru the browser. i spun up a new live arch session i built with archiso. still can't get a hit thru pacman tho. really can't explain it.