This all tells me that the distro maintainers put a
shockingly low priority on having sound work OOTB,
otherwise, why didn't they do this a year ago? AFAICT it's
just laziness.
Laziness and commercial pressure.
The commercial distros spend their time in patching kernels,
creating distro dependent configuration front ends and
adjusting the desktops. They do not spend time to adjust all
software packages, and so they often take the packages as
downloaded from the web.
Best regards
ce