It's mostly that I want my own list management, key combinations, navigation, etc. Once the entire UI is my oyster, I realized I don't have to settle for how someone else decided to lay out the menus, etc. 25 years ago I would just learn all the key combos and be set, but 12 major iterations later, few to zero of those UI skills and muscle memory state has survived. So now, I can do my own and no one can take it away from me :)

I think you must have very different needs if VLC is a substitute for iTunes/Music. For me, iTunes/Music is a music catalog app for managing my 9000+ MP3s with artists, album covers, playlisted based on various criteria, etc... where as VLC is an app for playing back single media files.

I absolutely love vlc

The iOS app is such a permanently buggy mess that I eventually had to bail after years of use with persistent issues that wouldn’t get fixed, and new bugs popping up. It can play hyper obscure formats, but the basic UI functions are very unstable

I constantly have trouble with VLC (long standing bugs, where it gets confused and fails to play audio after dvd menu clicks, etc).

I’ve had mixed luck getting llm’s to configure mpv (which involved writing lua or something for basic functionality!), but there are audio sync issues with it.

I miss the days when something like totem would just work and default to playing with deinterlacing and audio set correctly.

Configuring VLC is like solving a 200 variable boolean satisfiability problem or something. Also, the workarounds for core bugs come and go over time, so Reddit suggests toggling removed settings.