This is a very broad generalization and not a good one either. Particularly in this context. It's obviously not possible to do it for all video formats in a consistent way. I haven't read through all of it yet I could tell all the proposed solutions are hacky ones. Your scenario doesn't apply here. Businesses are different. This is on open source project. Anyone can work on it.

What are you even saying about the choas of the world?! Every dev knows how work is. You are just describing every other software job. Somehow it sounds like you are boasting how matured you are just because you do what your client asks/needs. Even then, many business/software make a concious choice to support or not support something based on some guidance. The guidance could be some core principles or just some product managers whim.

It's highly likely that VLC developers chose not to support the feature for the very reason(s) that's described in the post. It's a concious choice they made. I don't see anything wrong in that. They definitely are not some school kids with some daddy issues to hide behind some code. They clearly have answered all the questions from a technical stand point.