Why don't they split youtube-dl in two parts:

- The extractors part (all the scrappers basically)

- The cli tool

What would be wonderful is that the extractors part is splitted out, so that anyone can use it without using youtube-dl. That would be much easier to update it too, each extractor is independent, so it is only a question, does this scrapper (extractor) works or not.

The next step would be to have a multi-language format to describe a scrapper, instead of being coded in Python. But no idea if this is possible or maybe that would make things much more complex