by focusing on the trigger timestamp I think you're looking at the wrong
side of the problem. The timestamping is improved by using the same
hardware counter for the trigger AND regular timestamp during
playback/capture. If you look at a hardware counter during
playback/capture but the start position is recorded with another method,
would you agree that there's a systematic non-reproducible offset at
each run? You want the trigger and regular timestamps to be measured in
the same way to avoid measurement differences.
I will not disagree that most applications do not need precise
timestamping, but if you want to try to enable time-of-flight
measurements for presence or gesture detection you will need higher
sampling rates and micro-second level accuracy.