clue, meet literfizzer

You're being contradictory. You want less crap competing for sound output
priority and want glitch-free playback... so you want to go back to a bunch
of applications doing piss-poor direct access to ALSA and/or using the
crappy low-quality dmix mixer that can pretty easily introduce stuttering
and glitches under even remotely heavy load.

You act as if audio on Linux was all peachy and perfect until PA came
along. That's bullshit. It's been horrendous and barely usable all along.
It worked in some situations with moderate quality if you were lucky and
had the right drivers and only used the right applications. PA glitch-free
playback combined with quality mixing offers to finally make audio bearable
for the first time for _everyone_. Once the bugs are worked out of the
audio drivers, applications, and PA itself.

It's a hell of a lot closer to being realized that acceptable graphics
driver or wireless behavior on Linux, I'll tell you that much. In 10 years
of using Linux on mainstream hardware I've yet to have a video card that
works worth a crap without binary blobs, and this laptop here is the first
one I've ever been able to get wireless to work... and it requires hoops to
be jumped through (Broadcom). The problems people are having with audio
are _nothing_ in comparison, but I don't see you bitching about the
constant work being put into X/DRI or the wireless drivers and telling the
devs that they should switch back to the old way (what, plain VESA?
nothing?) because the new stuff is still buggy and incomplete (I don't even
want to get into how much time I spend trying to get video to work on both
old and new video cards -- and sometimes monitors -- compared to audio).

You don't and won't get that without a solid mixing daemon. Keep in
mind that kernel-space can't do floating point math and that reality is not
so great for the quality and performance of sound remixing and resampling.

Let me break this down for you. The software has bugs (that software being
PA, the ALSA drivers, and your user-space applications -- all of them, not
just PA), you have hit the bugs, and you're just short-fused enough to
think that said bugs invalidate the entire model. Wise people instead just
think that the bugs need to be fixed so we can solve the problems that the
old model has already proven incapable of solving.

Maybe PA got pushed into Fedora a little too early. I won't disagree with
that. I had a lot of pain with Fedora 8, too.

Do NOT be stupid and think that "Fedora pushed it too early" is the same as
"the whole model is broken."