www.linuxmusicians.com or the LAU (linux audio mailinglist) are good resources.
For modular setups and when using things like Supercollider, JACK (qjackctl) is what people use.
On Linux Desktop you're dealing with Pulseaudio (which is a layer above ALSA I think). In some occasions there is a fight between Pulseaudio and JACK for accessing the soundcard. There are several solutions for this. My solution is to use the internal soundcard for pulseaudio and the external card for JACK.
The app 'cadence' might be a interesting way to deal with this problem. It has tools for bridging Pulseaudio to JACK. And also to bridge ALSA MIDI to JACK midi (which is more accurate).
Yes, it's not the ideal world. But with the script mentioned, you've a decent start. Other option is to install the distro AVLinux, which does the configuration for you.
One interesting way to manage setups when using softsynths and a soft mixer for instance, is the Non-session-manager. Applications like Zynaddsubfx, Carla and non-mixer are handy then too: