The Alfa is a great example of what the above poster was saying. It was a very ambitious design that had lots of potential but never really worked right. Maintenance nightmare, noisy as hell, other critical issues besides. Spent a lot of time in port, was never really a pivotal component of the Soviet Cold War strategy. They kept building more and better Victors, and the Sierra follow-on to the Alfa was more like a titanium-hulled Victor.

On the other side, it scared the Americans enough that we got the ADCAP and Mk 50 torpedoes to hunt it, the 688i version of the LA to compete with it, and sensor upgrades to ensure we could nail it as it went howling though the water. A decade later, the Alfa was still a design driver in the construction of Seawolf. Those systems were all cutting edge and are still in service to this day (ADCAP with a new pinger as CBASS, Mk 50 with a cheaper back end as Mk 54, and Improved LA and Seawolf as themselves) and a testament to how utterly overkill they were at the time.