Regarding running Jack, it's not nearly as hard as you make it out to be. It took me the better part of an hour to do right.
Jack doesn't REQUIRE a RT kernel, it's a nice to have that reduces latency, but I haven't found latency to be a problem.
Getting Jack to work with Pulseaudio in the chain I've built is trivial, simply give Jack a duplex interface that is turned off in Pulse, and load jack sink/source modules as needed in Pulse to link the two servers.