I don’t think we can count the AUR repository as the “default package” because:

1. AUR is a community driven project, for users, by users. Repos are not maintained by the Arch team.
2. Arch user needs to explicitely get out of their way to access and use AUR, it is not enabled by default
3. AUR repos are not even packages (usually). They are build-instructions. There are specific -bin repos that provide packaged binaries, but that was not the case here, because the emulators license doesn’t allow that.

The issue here was that stenzek moved the emulator to a source-available license, which does not allow Arch to provide packages in their package repo. So people were using build instructions to build the emulator from source. And when that caused issues because something broke, people came to stenzek for support instead of the person maintaining the build instrucions.

This is nothing new. Before the steam deck came out, Handheld PCs have already been overpriced expensive. Other manufacturers haven’t bothered about affordability before, during ot after the steam deck.

That said, Gabe Newell said the steam deck was priced “painfully”, which means they probably had very low margins on the hardware and are making it back on sales on their store. Other manufacturers do not have that luxury.