I can at least vouch for 1) drivers (arguably this is an alsa thing, but pulseaudio had a way of exposing problems), and 2) your tolerance not just for glitches, but also latency (in the form of buffers) and overall sound quality.

I suspect, based on how few people seem to be upset about pulse audio (as opposed to what one might expect) that some subset of popular sound hw worked rather well. It's just not a subset I ever owned.