PulseAudio uses ALSA under the hood. You're dealing with all the problems of ALSA, and have a brittle, crashing, overly complex userspace daemon sitting on top of it.
If you don't need any of PA's features, why bother with it?
Linux audio is leaps and bounds better then it ever was. ALSO ALSA is not a dependency for PulseAudio it uses ALSO uses OSS which after version OSS 4 it has become my sound interface.
Re:PulseAudio 8.0 released
by broknbottle on Saturday January 23, 2016 @12:32PM
(#10959095)
PulseAudio still relies on ALSA or OSS at the Kernel level. Typically most setups are PulseAudio + ALSA.
I know the launch of PulseAudio was horrible with Ubuntu and Fedora implementation was just horrible but that was 10 years ago. Now PusleAudio has made Linux Audio much better then it ever was before.