Fair, but I still think they should switch. I don’t think it would be too difficult anyway. It should mostly amount to rewrite of the decoder as can be inferred from the fact that it is mostly a superset of MIPS64.

The perceived benefits, are being independent of the west on technology. Which RISC-V already provides.

RISC-V only gives you the instruction set and standard, it does not tell you how to actually do it. The way you handle the microarchitecture internally is up to you.

I don’t think there are any benefits compared to RISC-V with custom instructions, maintaining your own toolchain is also extra work which could benefit everyone with RISC-V

I wish they pivoted to RISC-V instead of their proprietary architecture

I don’t have good experience with Manjaro, if you want to go Arch based, I can recommend EndeavourOS

I say this as an Arch user