Either you are heavily misinformed about how difficult arch is, or you lack any confidence in your ‘Linux skill’.
Choose the system you want to achieve, follow the wiki and choose the software you want to use using it and you are good to go, it really is not that hard. You can always use archinstall.
Do you want to prevent brute forcing or do you want to prevent the attack getting in?
If you want to prevent brute forcing then software like fail2ban helps a little, but this is only a IP based block, so with IPv6 this is not really helpfull against a real attack, since rotating IP addresses is trivial. But still can slow down the attacker. Also limiting the amount of sessions and auth tries does significantly slow down the attacker.
If you just want to not worry about it set strong passwords, and when it is a multi user system where other ppl might access it, configure Public Key Auth so you can be sure the other users have strong passwords (or keys in this case) to authenticate.
With strong passwords or keys it is basically impossible to brute force your way in with ssh.