The future of realtime Linux in doubt

As an audio engineer I tend to be very fussy about the performance of my recording systems. My own experience leads me to believe that hard real time (which as has been pointed out is not something the Linux kernel does anyway) is not essential for audio production work. I do set up "realtime" scheduling privileges on my DAW systems (and use kernels with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y), but that isn't the same thing. I have however found it sufficient. YMMV of course.