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About a week ago I started to try to clean up my audio situation on Linux Mint as I was getting stuttering in a few programs. Managed to get PulseAudio routed in to JACK Audio Connection Kit 2 via pulseaudio-module-jack and an edit in default.pa configuration. That seemed to be working substantially better, with only a few sporadic stutters and an odd click whenever I slid the volume control on YouTube videos.

Today I restarted my system because graphics performance system wide was sluggish... and my audio didn't start.
I tried another restart, checking to see if PulseAudio was running (yes, as far as the SysMon stated) and JACK2 (no). Tried to reinstall JACK2 and all I got for it was Mint / Cinnamon hanging each program momentarily whenever they were started (including logging into the session of Mint.)

Normally I wouldn't try asking for help this early into the process, but I've already gone through a week of searching for information on properly setting this up. Most of the official documentation is ... not exactly clear for an end user and most users seem to be pointing at Canonical for an alleged improper installation / configuration of JACK (1 or 2, not sure) and PulseAudio within Ubuntu, which also seems to have been inherited by Mint.

Is anyone here versed enough in these Linux Audio libraries to at least point me to some better resources?

EDIT : I just tried bypassing JACK and PulseAudio in one program and am getting audio by directly connecting to ALSA sources. This gets audio for only one program at time, though, so I'm still hunting for a solution.

Unfortunately my knowledge is a bit outdated (I've generally avoided pulseaudio and don't know much about it other than it being a pain in my ass).
But with alsa you can use dmix http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc
Though many distros have dmix enabled by default so not sure what's going on in your case.

You can also make pulseaudio use dmix (uncomment 'load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix' in /etc/pulse/default.pa),
this effectively creates a ridiculous system of double mixing, but if your aim is to avoid pulseaudio as much as possible it's an option.
There's also https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse which sounds less ridiculous.

Regarding JACK it's generally awesome, the only problem (last time I tried it) is that it constantly runs and consumes a bit of cpu time.

Do post more if you're having trouble I can probably help a bit more.

When I originally did this for Ubuntu 12.04, I found that using the JACK packages from KXStudio helped smooth over a lot of the rough spots: http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/

I have not yet attempted to do this for later versions of Ubuntu since my "daily use" desktop is still running 12.04 (but I have a new build with 14.04 nearly ready to go, getting JACK working on it is in fact one of the last remaining tasks).