Personally Pulseaudio has always been "that thing that fixes all those problems I never had with ALSA." I realize there is more to it than that but I have never really understood what pulseaudio does for me a casual sound user? Sound on my computer is exclusively produced by mpd, vlc and flashplugin-nonfree and I do not remember the last time I used a microphone on a linux machine.[1] I have browsed through the docs a couple of times but I have never figured out why, let alone how, I would want to change anything.
The only thing about Pulseaudio that I am confident of is that it is less overkill than jackd for my use cases. What am I missing?
[1]: I guess I have used the microphone a couple of times but it was always because I thought I would try Skype again. But this always resulted in a ton of wasted time with 32bit libraries and an avalanche of qt dependencies. I would get skype to work but I used it so rarely that by the time I needed it again I had to go through all the nonsense all over again.