That's the ideal situation, of course, but I disagree with the entire premise of PulseAudio. It has some interesting features (per-application volume, network audio, synchronization between sound cards at slightly different sample rates), but those should have been implemented as additions to ALSA and/or one of the jackd implementations.

There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.