"The results reflect YouTube’s struggles to expand its core audience beyond teens and tweens. Most YouTube users treat the site as a video repository to be accessed from links or embedded video players posted elsewhere, rather than visiting YouTube.com daily. Google executives want them to turn on YouTube the way they turn on television, as a habit, where they can expect to find different “channels” of entertainment."

If they want me to sit in front of this as passive entertainment, why not start by giving me an interface to view my subscribed content, in order, as an RSS-reader-like experience? I should be able to hit 'play' and have it scan through all the new videos on the channels I am subscribed to, without hitting 'click to skip' length ads, going into a mysterious related videos algorithm, or manually navigating through a list and clicking on each one.

For that matter, I should be able to interface with a channel in that way regardless of whether they have created a playlist or not, using 'autoplay in order of upload'.

If you wanna get complicated, give me a search functionality that will do the same. 'Autoplay feed of anything mentioning Minecraft mod XYZ in the title/description'

Right now, Youtube has a nominal subscription function that actively deters you from using it smoothly. Fix that before you assume you can't turn it into a 'habit'.