I will try to update Pd's included copy of portaudio and portmidi. I know from another project that the portaudio device string handling has been improved (on macOS at least) and longer names are no longer truncated.
One issue with doing this is I've made some changes to both libs in order to fix things we've found in Pd. These have been forwarded upstream but I'm not sure if they are in any of the newer stable releases. My plan is pull out of these that we still need into separate patch files and either write a script for updating both libs and/or simple instructions on updating and applying any patches. This way we don't have to worry about losing any hard-won fixes while still being able to upgrade with new Pd releases. This approach is similar to that I've taken with applying the key fixes to TK 8.5.19 for the mac app build.
I'll try to get to this in the next few days.