Bear in mind that in the computer world, u-law is to audio what ascii is
to text: flawed, not completely adequate, easy to complain about, and
nearly universally available. That we should have something like
audio/basic for simple interoperability strikes me as hard to argue
with. That there should also be a group of people designing a better
high-level audio subtype with higher fidelity & better compression is
also something I strongly believe. I'm not enough of an audio expert to
be a part of such an effort myself, but I'd love to see it happen, and
I'd hate to see that worthy goal set back by efforts to tweak
audio/basic in relatively minor ways (e.g. to get marginally more
compression, at the cost of a far less standard format....)