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.