What were your problems exactly? In my case I used Linux full time from late 2012 to early 2014 and during that time I haven't had a single problem related to it, all while running bleeding edge Archlinux. The only issue was with bluetooth headphones but I'm pretty sure it was more with BlueZ being a pile of garbage than Pulseaudio being bad, given that BlueZ was giving me problems with all sorts of other (non sound) peripherals as well.
Mostly the same issues as BeetleB. It purports to pump audio samples. It does not. Another moving piece in between your app and ALSA, which seems to break down inexplicably when the crap that it's abstracting "just works" with zero configuration. Many times the solution to an audio problem on linux is to get rid of pulse. Still.
Also had issues with bluetooth, as you seem to have. I will permit the idea that this is possibly unrelated (bluez is garbage, yes), but bluetooth audio was working for me previously, and only broke when pulse entered the picture.
FWIW from an API perspective I still think OSS seems better than ALSA... Linux audio seems to be a repeated case of people confusing interface with implementation, and the interface only ever gets more complex.
The amusing part is that FreeBSD is still on OSS, and it "just works" - and they let multiple apps play audio at the same time simply by opening the same device. It's been that way... I don't even remember how long, but I think it was already there 15 years ago?
And OpenBSD introduced its own userspace daemon for mixing multiple audio streams together. The by-then already existing libsndio would then just default to opening the socket provided by that daemon. So, the change was transparent to applications (no code changes, they already used libsndio) and users (no configuration, at least for people running defaults) and didn't cause years of grief, agony, churn, hatred, and shitstorm.
Of course you can still trivially disable the daemon and you lose software mixing & resampling, but things that work within these limits will run ok. But there really shouldn't ever be need to disable it, it just works.
I tried installing it a few months ago, and... could not get any sound. Similar experience several years ago. I'm sure I could Google and fix, but for me, it did not "just work".
Don't get me wrong. For years, ALSA was a pain. But in the last 10 years, ALSA has always "just worked" for me. I think the only time I had to fiddle with ALSA in the last decade was to get the mic on a headset to work.
For me, "Just Works" includes me not having to install it at all, not it being easy to set-up on LFS. Pulseaudio is pre-installed on Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
ALSA is part of the kernel, it's likely been pre-installed in every Linux you have ever run. It's not a mark against it that you choose to install distros developed to use pulseaudio.
I've occasionally seen issues on one of my machines where applications would send out garbled audio until I killed the PulseAudio process and restarted the application (the latter was insufficient alone; PA had to be killed). Hasn't happened lately, though, and it might've had more to do with the application.
I use Slackware, which tends to be more conservative about these things; the fact that PA is now the default in Slackware is a good indicator of PA having overcome its growing pains.
I have a feeling if PA was really as broken as it was once upon a time, Bluetooth audio would've been sacrificed in favor of a more stable and reliable system.
Additionally, I somewhat doubt BlueZ would've made PA such a hard dependency if they weren't reasonably sure that it's stable enough for primetime.
Are you actually using PulseAudio? Having run Arch (well, Parabola) since 2011, I haven't had any problems with PulseAudio... because I've never installed PulseAudio. Actually, I did have a problem with Wine and lib32-libpulse lagging slightly behind the video (where it's only a fraction of a second off, but enough that it doesn't feel like the words match the faces); and then I figured out how to get Wine to use ALSA, just like everything else.
