Yeah I just stick my bash scripts and custom executables and stuff in ~/bin.
I think you'd definitely benefit from going rolling, not Arch necessarily* (though it is a joy to deal with). Debian testing might make sense since you could do an Apt package list and then use Apt in Debian to get where you were. Downside is no PPAs (afaik?). Or OpenSUSE on tumbleweed I guess.
(* I realise it's kind of an irritating step to take when what you have is basically working and you don't want to fuck with it, you just want it to keep working, but I do think you'd really like Arch. It's certainly more work to set up, though not as much as people seem to think, but once it's up it's
so easy. You just don't get the breakages you get on other distros because everything is, at base, simple. Plus the
AUR pisses all over PPAs </evangelism>)