That's too bad! I've used the MIDI and it works well albeit I've only written things in using WebMIDI not the ALSA sequencer. I'm really curious about your side project, would you mind sharing it?
For sure!
I'm working on an open source gameplay framework and one of the 'upgrades' I'm planning is MIDI based manipulation of trees of gameplay values at runtime from knobs.
You can read more here
https://wesxdz.dev/bicycle-mango