> It really seems to me like the approach of audio guys is to try to get latency to zero, rather than accepting variable latency and simply accounting for it with larger buffers and proper timestamping
Uh, no. In fact, you can't do jackd with 0 latency and that isn't the goal. RTFS. Your scenario is FAIL and it is clear you have never used it in production. Why not actually listen to the people that actually have done this?