Anyone foolish enough to build a music listening system on top of them unfortunately deserves whatever they get. I don't have much sympathy.
There is a real market opportunity for someone to do just this cleanly on Windows; Apple works hard to make things more secure (aka changes the software & hardware interface for backups) all the time though.
Top priority: getting media (pics+videos) off the device. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Yes. This very issue (the complexity and difficulty of properly using iTunes) has been commented on by a noted and famous Twitter user, btw: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=from%...
I use rsync to sync to my phone. The nice thing about Android is that if you're sufficiently determined you can get any of the standard linux ecosystem tools to work.
Unfortunately, the version I use seems to have been hidden from Google Play. It still shows up in my apps, even when I activate a new phone, but searching for it on Google Play goes nowhere. In any case, it works fine for me whether the phone is rooted or not.
I'm just using the standard one that came with my S5 (running Android 6.0.1 I think), because I'm lazy and it works OK I guess and I haven't bothered to look for something better, but with the enormous number of apps in the Play Store, I assumed that when I got around to it, there'd surely be a nicer music player out there.
Music syncing isn't bad on Android, if you keep your music on an SDcard. Just pop out the card, stick it in your computer, and use rsync.
Edit: seriously. Apple has not forbid to write music players/organizers, neither did they close access to the iTunes library files, so you can import easily if you want to do so.