I tried Arch this year for the first time and I really liked it, but also encountered really crappy fonts. Not sure what gives there. On my Debian machine the fonts seem on par with my Mac (to my non-font-snob eyes, which were at least able to notice Arch's badness).
I'd say you don't have to abandon X to get decent fonts. I think the Arch defaults are just bad.
Arch doesn't do anything by default. That's the Arch way. You install what you need. There isn't anything precluding Arch in particular from having good fonts, you just have to know what fonts to install. I've just never found ones I liked. I recall in years past using Debian doing a lot of extra work after installing a package to get halfway-decent fonts, but they were still just halfway-decent fonts.
Well I think the issue may have been that everything was set up to use the old-style XLFDs instead of routing everything through freetype. Not sure when you are referring to (it's been a while since I've done a clean install of debian myself, I just move my install from disk to disk as the years and hardware pass), but AFAIK font support in X has been pretty good for about 10 years, and by now most distros have the newer stuff enabled without a lot of fuss.
Then again as I mentioned I am not a "font snob" - it's not very distinguishable to me, beyond the "old-style" (pre-freetype) stuff looking kind of bad; YMMV.
I'd say you don't have to abandon X to get decent fonts. I think the Arch defaults are just bad.