While I'd agree that VLC is fairly bad usability-wise, concentrating on this single feature is wrong, I think. It's an obscure feature buried two or three layer

While I'd agree that VLC is fairly bad usability-wise, concentrating on this single feature is wrong, I think. It's an obscure feature buried two or three layers deep in an effects panel that most users never see or use. VLC has a lot of features that often are rather tangential to a media player and it can sometimes act as a frontend for ffmpeg (especially the stream/convert tools). The fact that basic features, power user features and plain gimmicky crap (like the puzzle mode) are lumped in all together in one application without organization, rhyme, reason, or separation almost automatically makes for atrocious UI. With some features being added by someone who felt the need for it or needed an exercise in programming doesn't help. VLC is a kitchen sink of vaguely media-related stuff and the UI does little to hide this. One point where I'm split on is single-key hotkeys. For years it was trivial to crash VLC simply by starting to type (something that happened to me regularly when I forgot that my IM application didn't have the focus, but rather VLC). If it didn't crash, you now had the video horizontally mirrored, in greyscale, with subtitles in Ancient Sumerian and video, audio, and subtitles were all a second out of sync to each other. Good luck figuring out how to revert that. Having hotkeys only be F keys and Ctrl+something at least has the benefit that you can't mess up things accidentally, at the expense of needing chords to interact with the application via keyboard (I'd say Windows Media Player's Ctrl+P for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on which button had the focus was just as bad, but at least you couldn't crash it by typing into the wrong window by accident. As is YouTube for requiring K for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on where the focus is ...).