The playlist actually has a lot of options which are randomly buried in the settings. You can change settings so double-clicking a video file just adds it to the end of the playlist. Or you can make every new video open in its own new player. Like I said, feature creep is one of VLC's biggest problems.
Those are "options buried in the settings", quite the opposite of "feature creep". You've got to enable them, and doing so makes the application behave thew way that you want it to, and not be confined to the default configuration.
The programs that have a problem are the ones that dumb-down the UI to the point that it's impossible to deviate from the defaults.
"In VLC, as of 1.1.11, you have to go to interface, preferences, hotkeys, and doubleclick the GLOBAL hotkey you need to set. Press the media key on the keyboard, and it'll return but will act like nothing changed. Click "Apply" and it should show you the media key identification of the key you pressed. Once you have setup all your keys, save, and completely exit and restart VLC."
For me, on both Mac and Windows, VLC key bindings fail to take effect until I restart it (any key bindings, not just global media hotkeys), and many options simply don't get saved at all. I have to hand edit the configuration text file. Ridiculous.
"As for saving, make sure you click 'Save' on the options dialog. OK applies them without saving, while Save applies and saves them."
Yes I am pressing the "Save" button. There is no "OK" button, and if there was both an OK and a Save button, that would still be a terrible user interface design.
Basic simple things like that just don't work. Maybe my preferences file keeps getting corrupted, but that should NOT happen, ever. At least it should give me an error message instead of just silently losing. Shameful.
Then there's the way it decides to resize the playlist window really big for no reason at all. Why can't the playlist window just stay the same size?
It crashes all the time, and then when I restart it, it ALWAYS asks if I want to report the last crash to the development team. No I don't, and I also don't want it to ask me that every fucking time. I just want it to shut the fuck up and play a video. Of course there is no option I can find to turn off that annoying modal pop-up dialog. A not-terribly-designed user interface would have a checkbox on the annoying modal dialog that says "Never ask me this ever again", and I wouldn't have to go through an unsuccessful wild goose chase through the millions of advanced options searching for a way to turn that dialog off.
The simple preference user interface has checkbox options to disable video and audio. What's the point of that? In fact, those are the first options in the video and audio sections! Who would ever want to disable video or audio in a video player? You already have a volume and mute control, and you can disable video and audio tracks from the menus. So why is that the first option in the simple preferences user interface? Was there a huge demand from novice users for that option? Terrible user interface design.
There are many other things about the UI design that are extremely annoying, a lot having to do with the out of control feature creep and totally uncoordinated committee design. All those advanced options, yet there is no way to set it to always show advanced options every time. Isn't it ironic that it has millions of options, but no option to always show the millions of options by default? Or maybe it's just failing to save the "advanced mode" option. So lame.
It gives me the distinct impression that nobody on the development team gives a shit.
I had a problem similar to the one you described, but it went away when I moved backwards to VLC 1.1.5. I think 1.1.10/1.1.11 was just a very buggy release, as mkv playback is also broken on that version.
