Yes, exactly. The Git repository is terrific resource as a place to conveniently store everyone's patches, but of course some patches may be "bad" (by one criteria or another), and that is OK (good even) for its purpose.
I'm running Linux, and so date was broken and thus so was the web server, I looked in the repository and was happy to see someone had a fix, and I didn't even have to read the date man page (lazy me!)
So, just like you say, Paul's canonical releases of arcn.tar and a community repository (for good patches, bad patches, experimental patches, weird patches...) are both useful.
"... I'm running Linux, and so date was broken and thus so was the web server, I looked in the repository and was happy to see someone had a fix, and I didn't even have to read the date man page ..."
Yes. When projectileboy said "the Git repo that's been created", I assumed he meant the one you just linked to (I don't know of any other), which is where I found the date fix.