I would want to see all upstream updates for anything installed on my system to avoid even considering a partial upgrade.

Well said!

Perhaps not in as much need as TIA, but I like the concept behind https://academictorrents.com/ and seed what I can

You don’t know why you prefer Archiso?

I second this. Until I have a solid use case for archiso, I strongly prefer tracking my dotfiles + installed packages and manually provisioning a fresh install.

Thank you! I’ll add these to the original post (and hopefully this comment is upvoted to the top)

Thanks for pointing this out, I had no idea. If someone wants to point me towards an active/popular fork of this repo, I’m happy to add that to this post.