with respect to your analysis:
It's really not that complicated. You're making this out to be a big deal, but really all you need to do is google a little and/or ask the PA community via the mailing list or IRC. You make it sound like we're trying to kidnap you in the middle of the night or something. Please don't resort to unnecessary hyperbole.
Well, you did manage to parse my expression pretty well despite its being too hyperbolic.
I should have been clearer that from my seat it looked like ALSA resources were being hijacked by pulseaudio. It is that which I would have wished you to understand rather than, "we're trying to kidnap you in the middle of the night or something." The "middle of the night" thing, though unintended, is near enough to the facts-- I started flailing about for a solution ca. 3:30 am of the same day.
The conditions that occasioned my feeling that Pulse "hijacks" ALSA resources is, e.g., reflected in the error message displayed in this exchange:
[root@speedy ~]# amixer ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
amixer: Mixer attach default error: Connection refused
Please try to see this from my point of view. I am only trying to use an ALSA utility to see what is wrong with my sound system (a diagnostic procedure that has been recommended by ALSA for some time). I have no business with pulseaudio. Yet the default case chooses a null card, based on what pulseaudio will recognize, rather than my perfectly good RME 9652 audio card which ALSA has recognized without help or interference from pulseaudio.
A bit more tinkering and research jogs my memory and I recall that I can give these ALSA utilities a card number argument, and when I do I see the result that I expected to see as a default (not such a wild assumption since I have exactly one audio card installed, and ALSA recognizes that card, and this is after all an ALSA utility that I am trying to use). Had amixer, by the way, failed only with the last line of the message, I would not have the impression that pulseaudio was hijacking resources.
I should perhaps point out that one of the adjustments that I have made in the past to get ALSA and friends working was to remove all traces of pulseaudio. Working largely on representations such as you quote in your response, "*For the last couple years there has been an agreed protocol for graceful handover of the audio device between PA and JACK.*" , I am accepting the developers' representations and trying to leave all their good work in place. Information that was "public and not hard to find", and that I could "google", suggested the radical excision of pulseaudio to get things working smoothly in the past. Since I took this approach I am not as well aware of how ALSA and pulseaudio have evolved together as perhaps you think I ought to be. Mea culpa.