Can you hear me now?

"What these extra sliders are exposing is the same kind of thing as the controls under the flap on your VCR. The people too scared to even programme the VCR clearly shouldn't be playing with these sliders, but there was a reason they were provided."

For the odd use cases, sure.

For the common cases where the audio hardware just has 20 different knobs that all need to be set to specific values to get consistent audio volume out of the two or three common outputs on the hardware, I shouldn't have to touch any advanced knobs. It should just work. But ALSA is not making it just work, and ALSA is not exporting enough information for applications like PulseAudio or desktop volume tools to set the mixer values properly.

The applications could create some kind of database mapping sound cards and their respective mixers to a list of standardized labels and attributes, but there's no guarantee that ALSA won't just break those in the future by changing names, because they're non-standardized and not considered part of the API/ABI. The only way such a database would be useful is if it was maintained and shipped as part of ALSA itself.

But if ALSA were to do that, they could just fix the freaking issue at its core and be done with it.