Pulseaudio is crap. It hides the devices that ALSA exports for little purpose, and IME introduces more problems than it tries to solve.
Avahi is interesting in theory; but when I try to say "ping celtic.local" on my home network, there's about a 50-50 chance that it'll find what the right IP address is.
I'm not using systemd, and won't change to it, either. Enabling or disabling a sysv init scripts requires moving about a few symlinks. What more does one need?