LinuxQuestions.org - Leap 15.3 and pipewire: horrible performance

I finally got around to updating my primary desktop system to 15.3 (partly due to an X Windows MFU that caused it to start dying with segmentation errors) and noticed that my existing Jack+PulseAudio setup sounded absolutely horrible. Random skips made any music unlistenable. (Anyone old enough to remember playing a cassette that's been wrinkled in a car tape player... everything sounded like that.)

I noticed that Pipewire was running on the system. After shutting down all the audio-related software, I removed Pipewire from the system, logged out and back in again, and started up the Jack-with-the-Pulseaudio configuration I had on 15.2. Sounds was back and enjoyable again.

Q1: Is Pipewire really this bad? Or is it just not configured to work well out-of-the-box?

Q2: Why would a distribution want to include a dependence on a what appears to be a dicey sound subsystem on seemingly unrelated software? [1] While uninstalling Pipewire, I was informed that I would break Thunderbird if I continued. (Thunderbird? My email client? (Yes... it can play sounds about incoming mail but it doesn't have to.) I uninstalled Pipewire anyway and let YaST uninstall T-bird as well. The version that Leap includes is a dozen or more releases behind current (just like Firefox) and T-Bird 91.x installed from the tar archive just fine.)

Anyone having a better Pipewire experience than I just had? What (if any) hoops did you have to jump through to make it work?

TIA for any hints, tips, war stories, etc...

[1] - Distributions have been doing this since the introduction of CUPS---maybe even earlier. Ugh! Talk about opinionated software.