I think you're right, this is a great way to move forward, especially if it's possible to put a bit of distance between the old youtube-dl and the new project.

I think you're right, this is a great way to move forward, especially if it's possible to put a bit of distance between the old youtube-dl and the new project. Hopefully, it wouldn't require as much effort as when a lot of the UNIX utilities were rewritten to get properly licensed versions back in the 80s - I remember a description of how they were rewritten from being cpu-optimized to being memory-optimized to avoid any code similarities. The trick, I guess, would be to restructure the code so that the new "dl-webvideos" project would be hard to construe as a continuation of the original project. The other trick would be, that the new solution has to be started fast to avoid losing momentum.