I like Endeavour a lot. Their Xfce desktop is far more attractive than I could generate on my own, and they have most of the tools I would want pre-installed - plus those nifty graphical updates. They do tend to be moving away from Xfce to Plasma but Xfce continues to be available, along with many other desktops. However, the archinstall script has brought Arch Linux very close in terms of user friendliness and makes it harder for me to use a derivative distro - even a virtual Arch clone.

this is why a "community of support" is one of my criteria for distro selection.  I've seen some REALLY nice 1-developer distros....that eventually faded into oblivion.  OTOH, a similar but related concern happens with corporate-sponsored distros.  Those distros are likely to continue being developed, but could be snatched away for various reasons relating to profit motivations.  I'm looking at Canonical and whomever is the parent company of SUSE now, and nearly everything in the RHEL family.  If the parent company decides to change policies, or user terms, it's unilateral.  Unless you have the infrastructure in place to fork, host, and develop....you're better off looking for a new distro.  JMO...   The happy medium, for me, is in between.....a respectable sized developer oligarchy behind the distro, but NOT corporate backed; and a friendly, welcoming, helpful community to help troubleshoot any issues and provide tutorials for new users.  Distros like Debian, Mint, Manjaro and Arch come to mind.  One could maybe question or argue how welcoming and helpful the Manjaro and Arch communities are (RTFM?!), but there is no question the Arch WIKI is the gold standard....I've consulted the Arch WIKI as a Debian user to successfully solve issues!   With all that said, I consider Endeavour to be a "visually massaged and aesthetic Arch"; in the same manner that I consider Spiral to be Debian.  If you pull packages from the repos of the "main distro" and simply add visual polish and/or non-free firmware (Spiral), I think the derivate is actually the main distro.  JMO....but that is why I was willing to break my own rule of criteria regarding user-base when I selected Spiral as the base to make my custom Debian distro, as Spiral was much closer to my personal preferences than mother Debian was.  While Spiral had a much smaller community, and not many users, I did verify that it 100% pulled from Debian repos.  The biggest thing Spiral brought to the table was inclusion of the non-free firmware repo that was included as a default.  Debian allows for that now, as per user preference, so I fully expect Spiral to die on the vine.  But I'll be no worse off, because it draws 100% from Debian repos.  No harm, no foul.   Endeavour is nearly identical in that respect.  1 additional repo for Endeavour themes and aesthetics.  If Endeavour folds, just comment out that repo to eliminate it and Endeavour will still be 100% Arch.  Endeavour just presents a more advanced aesthetical start point than Arch; it's a shortcut.  But I suspect most Arch users think like you did Ray, and actually prefer to customize Arch exactly how they want it; as opposed to how Endeavour thinks you might like?  (Endeavour is very close to my tastes, so I like their shortcut, LOL!)

When I originally installed EndeavourOS it had a default Xfce desktop - which suited me fine. Now the ISO is set up for Plasma which I don't want to run. You can still get Xfce of course but you have to netinstall - meaning you need online access. Might as well run archinstall and get what you want. The very nice looking desktop remains with Endeavour and some nifty graphical tools but I can get by without them. I know for sure Arch will be around as long as I want to use it.

Agreed. Since Endeavor uses vanilla Arch repos and only really provides themes and icons in their repos, I don't see it going away. Just for testing purposes, I actually changed an Endeavor install into an Arch install a couple of years ago. 

Well maybe if you had a home theater system and you wanted to game in Linux it'd be okay. It looks pretty inflexible for the average Linux user though. Better to roll your own or install something like Garuda Linux.