I just got bit by the new Firefox dependency. Installing PulseAudio left me without sound in VLC (even though I'm using the PulseAudio output plugin) and Firefox can't play videos anymore.
I haven't tried apulse -- I solved the problem by not using Firefox anymore -- but I hear it gives good results.
Thing is... I know what you're saying, and I don't doubt it's probably just some trivial issue that I can solve with a two-hour trip to Google and my PA config files. However, not running PA works fine, and has been working fine for like 12 years on every computer I've owned. It's literally no effort at all. I could spend some time getting sound to work again, or do absolutely nothing at all and have it working fine, just as it's worked for the last six years on the machine in question.
The days of endlessly troubleshooting ALSA settings and OSS wrappers aren't really gone if we're troubleshooting PA settings and ALSA wrappers instead.
Sounds like a better option, IMO.
MPD comes close to MOC but it's too complex to use for me, and some clients don't actually list all of the files in my library.
I might just go back to Clementine, if it works. That's what I use on Windows.