The best way to tune the algorithm on Youtube is to aggressively prune your watch/search history.
Even just one “stereotypical” video can cause your recommendations to go to shit.

Doing it yourself is fine as an educational exercise for newbies, but skilled linux users generally have better things to do than to do the setup by hand for the nth time. On the other hand the “vanilla”/bleeding-edge approach of Arch makes it one of the best bases for derivative distros available, so basing your distro on it is a no-brainer for many.