Upstream add pulseaudio as an insane hard dependency to GNOME, Xfce doesn't. This has nothing to do with Debian. Pulseaudio might provide something useful for some usages, but it's not needed just to get sound, since it does use ALSA, it's just a layer. Pulseaudio not always is fine with the information it needs from the ALSA drivers, so I recommend against pulseaudio (there are other reasons too) and to set up ALSA correctly for your audio device.
Why my audio didn't work before I install pulseaudio? As far as I remember, synaptic package manager didn't install any extra software apart from pulseaudio and pavucontrol dependencies.
However, IIUC you want it working out of the box, but with Linux it's nearly impossible to get everything working by default. If Suse works out of the box, you should use Suse and than never do an upgrade.
I strongly recommend to learn how to get Linux working by setting it up yourself and not to hope that there is a distro that makes everything working by default.
I am busy and I have limited time to build everything from scratch. If I had time I would love to play with Gentoo and learn more about linux and how it works but and how I can optimize unfortunately I don't.
I don't have a computer related education as well but I am coming from an engineering background. So, I guess I may be missing extra stuff that I was supposed to know already...
If I can't go with Debian I will install Opensuse 13.1, which is an evergreen version. Opensuse Evergreen editions get support for three years or more. Setting up evergreen will require some effort on compiling the extra programs that opensuse doesn't have but at least I will be able to use it as a productivity machine.
Yes, I would appreciate any help but I already installed pulseaudio. I don't see anything wrong with sound as it seems to be working properly now except for the pulseaudio warning during the boot.We perhaps could help you, if you would post the messages you get with or without pulseaudio. Running apps that need audio in a terminal, in verbose mode, checking log files in /var and last but not least taking a look at ~/.xsession-errors should provide the needed information.