I think initially it was because the distro repositories were fairly small, agree now it is often a lot of niche stuff now which is one reason people who don’t use the AUR don’t really miss it either.

That package is in Fedora and Debian testing/Sid and the next Ubuntu. There is also an Ubuntu ppa for the and it’s on the opensuse build service.

I guess I was baffled when FVWM of all things was an AUR package. To me, that's something that's been available in the mainstream package set on almost any full-sized x86/x86-64 distribution made in the last 25 years. I suppose it's not popular these days, but you sort of expect it to materialize because it was checked into auto-build processes in the late Clinton administration and never removed.

Yeah if the AUR can stop me from having to compile even just one package from instructions on a github page (like with corectrl, which I also use lol), then it's enough for me to keep using arch. I will say, AUR is in the normal arch repo I think? But there's other packages I've used in the past that I can't find in there, like specific versions of mangohud or gamescope, goverlay, etc.

AUR still means you gotta compile sometimes, but it's so much less of a hassle to just search the AUR and hit go then to mess around compiling something manually.