Re: instead of fixing the implementation
The thing about free software is that each software "product" is developed by a team of people who want to work on that product with that team - on the whole people aren't going to work on stuff that doesn't interest them, or work with people they don't like. And there's politics, of course. When OSS (which never worked very well with Linux) went proprietary it was obvious that Linux people would develop an alternative, and by the time it went free again people had invested heavily in ALSA development.