We are basically agreeing. The point is not that you cannot automate pacman, but rather that other package managers automate for you, which is bound to be a virtue for some people. I personally never found the "integrated" rollback in dnf/yum particulary useful, but I've heard of enough people who used it to accept that it is a desired feature. Same goes for "dnf config-manager" for managing repositories with one command.
As far as pinning goes, however, I disagree: if you mark a package as IgnorePkg it does not get updated. You could use either naming conventions or splitting the repos up to track different repos for different packages, but it starts looking like an antipattern to me (i.e. the way you would have firefox track jessie while you are on wheezy would be by setting up your own repo only for firefox, a bit of an hassle). It's fine if you are the packager, it's a bit cumbersome if you want a stable debian box with a fresher version of django and nginx.
After all the road map for pacman 5.0 proposes hooks and a better handling of optdepends. Both can be already automated via scripts, but both would be nice to have out of the box.
As far as pinning goes, however, I disagree: if you mark a package as IgnorePkg it does not get updated. You could use either naming conventions or splitting the repos up to track different repos for different packages, but it starts looking like an antipattern to me (i.e. the way you would have firefox track jessie while you are on wheezy would be by setting up your own repo only for firefox, a bit of an hassle). It's fine if you are the packager, it's a bit cumbersome if you want a stable debian box with a fresher version of django and nginx.
After all the road map for pacman 5.0 proposes hooks and a better handling of optdepends. Both can be already automated via scripts, but both would be nice to have out of the box.