The whole point of VHS-Decode is to bypass as much of the VCR's output circuitry as possible; capture from the read heads and apply modern digital reconstruction from there.

Unfortunately most of them are terrible. I've played with it on and off for years and even gotten individual tools for $100+ but still have issues. It's a bit of a mess with PAL/NTSC, different recommended settings, and at the end of the day you still need a high quality VCR to extract all the data. Those tend to go for hundreds of dollars here. You also need a time base corrector (some VHS have them built in I believe) to avoid dropping frames and causing desync.

A common suggestion is to just get a VHS->DVD recorder and then rip the DVD. You lose out on quality but it usually works and will save you a ton of time.

The suggestion by OP is probably if you truly want to maximize the quality.

There are some high end vcrs that can do a better job (according to those who have them.) but they are getting old and even broken ones can go for a couple hundred on ebay.

For home movies it isn't worth it since the starting quality probably isn't that great. I've messed around with it for a couple movies that were only released on VHS.