Despite having defended FOSS and advocated VLC ... I understand your viewpoint here. Calling on people to contribute bugfixes isn't especially realistic. Filing a bug on the fact that VLC has poor debug/log tools would be helpful though.
Particularly as a useful logging / debugging capability should enable more useful bug reports specific to function.
Sorry it's not working out for you, thanks for trying regardless.
I'm just jaded at this point. FOSS won the battle and lost the war. It's been subsumed into the bowels of these corporations that are ending up mega predatory.
And no, I don't think I will, I'll just use Youtube with ad blockers for as long as I can.