I've also been swapping between 'qpaeq' and the LADSPA based 'PulseAudio Equalizer' for years now and I quite agree that 'qpaeq' is completely inferior for all the reasons you've given.
It seems the LADSPA version has new maintainers over at...
I managed to package it but only afterwards realised that Ubuntu 18.04 only has python-gi version 3.26 and 3.30 at minimum is needed for the Gtk.Template bits to work.
So I thought I'd make the old one work without any crazy package holding. In short the reason for package holding above is because the package 'pulseaudio-equalizer' is now in the main Ubuntu repositories - but that is the 'qpaeq' version!
This script takes the webupd8 package and renames it (both in terms of package name and directory structure) to 'pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa' (which is incidentally what the Arch guys are calling it... https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa)...
Then it installs just fine and won't even conflict with 'qpaeq' if you want that too...
wget launchpad.net/~nilarimogard/+archive/ubuntu/webupd8/+files/pulseaudio-equalizer_2.7.0.2-5~webupd8~xenial0_all.deb
sudo dpkg-deb -R pulseaudio-equalizer_*_all.deb src
sudo sed -i '0,/\(pulseaudio-equalizer\)/s//\1-ladspa/' src/DEBIAN/control src/usr/share/menu/* src/usr/share/lintian/overrides/*
sudo sed -i 's/\(pulseaudio-equalizer\)\//\1-ladspa\//' src/usr/bin/* src/usr/share/menu/* src/usr/share/pulseaudio-equalizer/*.py
zcat src/usr/share/doc/pulseaudio-equalizer/changelog.Debian|sed 's/^\(pulseaudio-equalizer\)/\1-ladspa/'|gzip -c|sudo dd of=src/usr/share/doc/pulseaudio-equalizer/changelog.Debian.gz
sudo find src/usr/share -name pulseaudio-equalizer -exec mv {} {}-ladspa \; 2>/dev/null
(cd src && find usr -type f -exec md5sum '{}' \;|sudo dd of=DEBIAN/md5sums)
dpkg-deb -b src pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa_2.7.0.2-5~webupd8~xenial0_all.deb
sudo rm -Rf src
Works great 