I have a script that makes a list of every package and binary into an output file of packages as a list. I can just cat the output of the file in a subshell and pass that off to pacman -S. Pacman might complain here and there, but I can just edit the list. Then its just cp -r my config files that I've backed up and run my backups for movies, music, pics, games, etc.
And yeah, it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me. I still have to do other stuff like switch out bash for zsh, etc. Gotta love bash scripts and backup configs though. That plus actual backups makes restoration from catastrophic failure at least bearable, albeit still time consuming.