If the options are:<br><ol><li>Fix it once in pulseaudio, and win all applications working right, even legacy unmaintained ones that nobody's ever going to fix, or</li><li>Wait for all the application developers to get on board with a new protocol, even if they aren't maintained any more</li>
</ol>.. I'll give you 1 guess which I think is more realistic :)<br><br>2) is tantamount to saying "Well, everybody should just do this the pulseaudio way, because that's the right way." It may very well be, but you're not going to sell pulseaudio as the "right way" to the enough developers to have a consistent user experince without several years of stable adoption, especially with the current state of bitterness about pulseaudio rollout in current distributions. (If we can't count on the distros to do it right, we have about as much hope as a snowball in hell of getting all the little one-off developers on board)