Indeed, sounds like Arch. And it's not a bad thing that you can't fall back to older versions if you keep the cache. I mean in this age of cheap storage, who wouldn't?

About the rt kernel, I don't think it'll ever be maintained in the official repos. But at the same time, a lot of good packages will not either. That is why we have the AUR, and third-party binary repositories. If you see faults or would like something added with regards to rt/kernel/audio packages, do chat with the archaudio guys.

But if you feel you have grown accustomed to Red Hat or Debian systems, then go for one of the other suggestions here. Arch has got a BSD-style init; 1 file for runlevel config (inittab), 1 file for global config (rc.conf), 1 dir for init scripts (rc.d), 1 dir for optional init scripts config (conf.d). As such, it's simpler to administer and maintain without having to go through a maze of symlinking.