I also think it's bad behaviour. I have a sound card that supports multiopen, so I wanted to have both pulseaudio running and not have pulseaudio grabbing pcm.!default (because of some incompatibilities). Unfortunately, this is not possible without changing /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf.
Maybe pulseaudio could have it's alsa configuration in /etc/asound.conf (so the root could override the configuration) or in /etc/skel/.asoundrc (so that every new user will have pulseaudio enabled by default, but overridable in it's configurations).
I also think it's bad behaviour. I have a sound card that supports multiopen, so I wanted to have both pulseaudio running and not have pulseaudio grabbing pcm.!default (because of some incompatibilities). Unfortunately, this is not possible without changing /usr/share/ alsa/pulse- alsa.conf.
Maybe pulseaudio could have it's alsa configuration in /etc/asound.conf (so the root could override the configuration) or in /etc/skel/.asoundrc (so that every new user will have pulseaudio enabled by default, but overridable in it's configurations).