I don't think the problem was over-engineering. I think the problem was that if you plugged in headphones it would instantly set the volume to 100% from whatever value it was before.

Plus of course, initially you had to regularly run killall -9 pulseaudio to fix the sound. All in a moment when ALSA with dmix worked just fine.

Sometimes I think fedora and ubuntu are trying to hinder linux as mainstream desktop.