That makes a lot of sense. Speaking for the "hobbyists" out there, it'd be great to have that as an option in Ardour itself and not have to fiddle with setting

That makes a lot of sense. Speaking for the "hobbyists" out there, it'd be great to have that as an option in Ardour itself and not have to fiddle with setting up client/server/bridges just to plug in a microphone (which seems like a really common use-case!). FWIW I don't even need live monitoring where latency matters -- I just want to record, then stop recording, then play it back and edit it. I do know that programs like Adobe Audition on Windows offer that in a plug-and-play way.