I don't know if this will make any difference... I've found out that the bluetooth chipset is made by Texas Instruments, so the appropriate hciattach command is actually:
hciattach /dev/ttyS1 texas
Oh no, it's a nightmare...
The lag is not caused by swave vs texas, as I've tried on a desktop and once bluetooth audio was setup using the same python script, it had the same lag when playing from mplayer, while totem has none, apparently there is super high cpu usage using mplayer and a2dp, so some bug...
However, not keeping in line with the "if it's not messed up, don't fix it" golden rule, I aptiture removed bluetooth-alsa, as it shouldn't be needed and should be antiquated, rebooted. Now the bluetooth does start up, but the audio will not run.
Now, no matter which combo I try with having the bluetooth-alsa installed etc. it doesn't work, I've noticed:
Can't load plugin: /lib/bluetooth/plugins/libaudio.so in the syslog, the indicated solution to this on the web is recompile bluez-utils.
But it was working, before "I fixed it" so how can this be?
Ahhh....
EDIT 1: Hmmm, some progress, have replaced texas back with swave in /etc/bluetooth/uart, after restart, after stopping bluetooth-alsa, and starting bluetooth, this is fine and audio is initialized... Now just can't get passkey-agent to register the pin to the headphones, which went fine yesterday... Some further twiddlin' probably necessary.