Pulseaudio still won't detect the headphone jack on my old intel board, and Skype on my newer machines on Linux will routinely fuckup playback.
One also wonders how much of the PA cleanup was handled by people that weren't Lennart.
In particular for problems of getting Youtube (or any browser audio) to work while other apps use JACK directly.
Although on a recent new install it seemed to work without them as well.
One problem is I need to start/stop the qJackCtl thing every time my laptop comes back from sleep, to get sound working again. There must be a way to automate (or, preferably, fix) this, right? Anyone know?
But, also to be fair - like you, I maintain my own systems and do not overly depend on the teeming-mass-reality as a derivation of stability. My personal Linux DAW systems, running now for decades, have attained a level of productivity that I would at least hope is represented in the current niveau, vis a vis Popular Linux Distro designed for audio (e.g. pure:dyne, Arch Pro Audio, 64 Studio, UbuntuStudio, et al.) .. for the newcomer, it should of course 'all just work' from boot-up, which I hope is the case. It is for me, anyway: I've expunged pulseaudio from all of my machines, and make do with Jack. My studio uses 48-channels of digital audio, everything-is-a-file .. a working and functional DAW, thousands of plugins, about 12 MIDI devices (synthesizers/effects rack) and so on, and the best thing of all: all source code included. So, yeah .. ;)
EDIT: apropos qjackctl, yeah, apmd:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/unix_commands/apmd.htm
.. or some such similar thing.
It is only since 14.04 that you have a small chance that opting to use pulseaudio is the better choice.
Just trying to get Skype working (which uses pulseaudio) cost me 2 hours last week, which is not at all nice when you have a call starting in 5 minutes.