When troubleshooting something, even a broken radio or coffee machine,
you should check on thing after the other.
Why do you do random tests running two sound servers at once?
You mentioned you want to use Ardour. At least for testing purpose
consider to use Ardour just with ALSA, explicitly without launching
jack and/or pulseaudio at all.
Btw. I'm very surprised that so many people need to do real-time audio
recording with pulseaudio. I know, thousands of people want to record
skype interview or watch youtube tutorials.
I don't know if
http://github.com/i-rinat/apulse helps with skype
interviews, but at least
http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ helps with
tutorials.