I'm surprised to hear that archinstall doesn't start with setting the keyboard layout. I have only installed manually and IIRC the installation guide shows how to change the layout as the first step after booting into the installer.

Meanwhile in Finland my first exposure to a Unix shell was in an introductory IT course in uni, and that inspired me to switch to Linux four years ago. Without all of that I would have never got my current internship where 90% of my work is in the terminal.

it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages

You keep saying this but can you give any concrete examples? I don't recall coming across anything like this.

I do the same except I only type "pow" :P