It is a fine GUI even with (unoficial) AUR, Flatpack , Snap, and Appimage support.)
Updating via Bauh is rarely causing any Problems, and non that cannot be fixed by running update in the CMD, a rollback or some quick research and 99% sem to be also happening via CMD (for me).
I don’t know, but I find packseek quite user friendly. Pacman does require some knowledge of syntax or where to find the relevant commands, but it’s not rocket science.
Instead, graphical tools are recommended again and again, all of which are really only useful for searching, because otherwise they often cause errors that are not easy to fix. Inexperienced users using these tools will install and update with them 90% of the time because it is supposedly easier to click twice than to type less than 20 characters in the terminal.
I suspect that usability is very often confused with subjectively pretty design.
I use both Octopi and yay. I don’t like using Discover or any Ubuntu-like software center since they don’t always have a huge selection and most of the apps are flatpacks.