I guess these exist because GTK makes it easy to build sleek apps that do the basic function well, but the road to a more serious app with all the features people generally might expect takes a thousand more issues.

Then they switch to Qt and realize that VLC and Haruna (a mpv frontend) already cover the bases.

When I switched from Windows the biggest problem by far was finding a good replacement for MPC-HC. VLC just feels clunky and mpv itself is just a cli app, not what a fresh Linux user is looking for. I did end up settling on Haruna since it has options that get me closer to MPC-HC than any other player.

Now that I am more familiar with Wine I am curious if MPC-HC would hold up.