OK, perhaps I was too harsh saying that VLC had the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. I had forgotten about The Gimp. They are both suffering from the same kind of pathological user interface problems that seem to result from a pretentious and cliquish committified developer community whose individual members each care much more about overdeveloping their particular paroquial corners of the applications than how it all fits together as a whole, and who religiously refuse to even consider looking at competing commercial products because to expose themselves to any non-open-source software would make them impure and suck out all their precious bodily fluids. But at least VLC's name wasn't chosen for the express purpose of being bigoted and obnoxious and repelling ordinary mainstream users, under the false pretense of being whimsically humorous and self deprecating like Git.