First install was Ubuntu 9.04 on a very basic and mainstream Dell desktop at the time. Most recent was Arch on a 2013 MacBook Air. Honestly, the only thing that made this complicated was that the bootloader was so out of date that it didn't recognize the newer NVME drive I put in it. After installing Arch, I messed around for a while getting the Fn/shortcut keys set up perfectly. I would not have even thought of doing that back in 2009.
Yeah I use arch on some of my computers and really don't get what people are talking about. As long as you're fairly comfortable doing some things from the command line it's really easy to maintain
Until you run it for more than a year and have more packages installed. Like everyday something doesn't work for me (ok granted some of it is my own fault). My arch install feels like it's held together by ductape and some silly string.
I think it trends lower on the low end of the "technical ability" axis because it's perfectly fine for grandma who just uses the internet, plays solitaire and occasionally emails, and who needs a family member to sysadmin their computer whether it's Windows or Linux. You can usually drop Mint on their old computer to keep it running and even speed it up a bit after Windows stops supporting it, and save them from buying a PC for awhile.
There's a bump up for folks who are making the switch on their own because they're not used to the ecosystem and might have hardware they like that is poorly supported in Linux; I remember my own early days trying to make the machine I already had work and having to install stuff from Git, now that I choose hardware for Linux compatibility that decreases.
There's a valley in the middle where "This is fine, it works satisfactorily."
Then at the high end of technical ability you have people who have opinions about systemd.
There's still no Arch-based OotB distro with refind, booster initrc, s6-init & s6-rc, turnstile + seatd session with touch-friendly notification-center in qt for wayland with pipewire.
I think you have the axes reversed..? Or maybe I didn't get the joke?
The technical needs are caused by higher technical ability, so the ability should be the x axis and the needs should be y.