to this day there's a bunch of weird shit like how if you seek around, playback speed gets thrown off, the start and ends of files are always cut off, if it runs out of CPU time before the next frame has to be drawn for whatever reason, it will skip decoding that frame (if it was a keyframe, you get the famous VLC video glitches lol)

I just use mpv, shit just works. There's almost no UI, but what's there on the OSD lets you do everything you'd want to as a normal person.