To reiterate, I don’t think there is anything wrong with using the AUR. I think that using an AUR helper that ties updating AUR packages to your pacman -Syu is a trap that people keep falling into despite the warnings in the wiki.

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.