Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.
Without going too far out into the weeds, lack of integration between filemanagers/filesystems and music players is the main problem. File managers aren’t conducive to sorting by audio file metadata - even those that support it force the user to manually enable those columns in list mode and support is spotty across file formats, meaning the user has to fall back on “hacks” like modifying filenames to sort properly when sorting by name.
Additionally, the browser-type design that’s dominant in file managers doesn’t lend to versatile use with other programs.
This is one area where I think BeOS had the right idea. There, audio metadata was accessible by way of the filesystem which made it easy to access by applications and meant that the file manager more robustly supported sorting by that metadata. Additionally, the file manager was similar to that of Classic Mac OS where windows were dead simple and each represented a single folder, which made it easy to use a file manager window as a playlist window.
Putting the equalizer upstream at the speaker level means that all of your audio is affected by it. And yet there are many times where I am playing certain types of music, such as classical or tracker impulse chiptune that needs some adjustments - i'd much rather be able to adjust it at the playlist and/or player level.
The advantage of a music player that builds a library from a set of folders is that it's infinitely faster to be able to do fuzzy searches particularly around metadata such as Idv3 tags.
Etc. etc.
How do you manage albums that could be classified as two or more genres?