My main problem with VLC is that when I accidentally hit the wrong key on my keyboard (usually in the dark, because that's how I watch movies), it is quite often almost impossible to get the settings back to what they were without restarting the player.

Keyboard shortcuts with no modifier key involved are evil. Even Gmail has those.

Funny how you say "evil" but all I can hear is "vi".

Oh it's fair game there. I love vi/vim

Thunderbird has no modifier shortcuts too.

Honestly, I'm absolutely not. I still vividly remember those times when we have to install codecs separately. And every month something something new and incompatible pops up on a radar, which sent all users on a wild hunt for that exact codec and instructions how to tweak it so the funny clip could play. Oh dear I'm not loking back to times od all versions of divX xVid, matroska, mkv avi wma, mp4, mp3 vba ogg and everything else, all thos cryptic incantations to summon a non-broken video frame on a modern hardvare, for everyone but few people in anime community who drove that insanity on everyone else. I'll die on a hill of VLC, despite all its flaws, because it gave an escape route for everyone else - if you don't give a F about "pixel perfect lowest overhead most progressive compression that is still a scientific experiment but we want to encode a clip with it" and simply want to view a video - vlc was the way. Nothing else made so much good to users who simply want to watch a video and not be extatic about its perfect colour profile, loosless sound and smallest size possible.

All other players lost their plot when they tried to steer users into some madness pit of millions tweaks and configurations that somehow excites aughors of those players and some cohort of people who encode videos that way.

I istall vlc very single time, because this is a blunt answer to all video playing problems, even if its imperfect. And walked away from ever single player who tries to sell me something better asking to configure 100 parameters I've no idea about. Hope this answers the question why VLC won.