Hey Nicholas!

 NB> I may have to go this route at some point in the future.

Agreed.  I can assure you it is worth the effort and time.  I just managed to
get it to stream audio from an internet radio station to the minijack to
powered speakers.  It works like a charm.  I haven't tried the framebuffer
video yet (/dev/fb0) but have noted the device was created.  Also I lack a hdmi
audio based monitor so I cannot test the hdmi audio output but I assume it
works.

 NB> That Archlinux aarch64 install got testy with me so I wiped it.

Me too.  I used the 32 bit slackwarearm with a 64 bit kernel to get things
started and then chrooted to the system built there to make the first actual
arm64 raspi3 rootfs which I am using now.

 NB> Certain things wouldn't work as expected, or at all even.

The console was hell on earth I thought.  Maybe it was my installation of it
that was at fault but it kept giving me grief while compiling so I abandoned
it.

 NB> I suppose that's why they don't care to support it though. :|

Personally I am blaming systemd.  It appeared to me that it was 99.99% of the
console grief I was seeing.

Life is good,
Maurice

... No llores por mí tengo vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.4.12(1)-release (aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu)