Okay so I FINALLY installed pipewire since I needed to do some rejiggering that wasn't cooperating in normal alsa
Being pretty much a drop-in replacement for pulse that doesn't suck as much is promising, at least, but I'm having trouble grokking the documentation so I'm very thankful it doesn't suck as much
I just need to figure out at some point how to automatically set up a loopback from the line-in... or figure out a way I can get VM startup/teardown to handle it