Why are media players so awful?

I'm curious. You mention WMP 10 and WMP 12 but what about WMP 11? Even to this day, I still prefer that version of WMP to 12 because 11 had a nice and easy to use UI in my view along with great library management features.

Darician said:

I'm curious. You mention WMP 10 and WMP 12 but what about WMP 11? Even to this day, I still prefer that version of WMP to 12 because 11 had a nice and easy to use UI in my view along with great library management features.

I've never installed/used Vista on my PC.
Until July this year, my "hand-me-down" PCs have always being obsolete junk.
This meant there was no possible way to run Vista.

I used Vista on several training courses and I didn't like it.
IMO, it takes 3x as many clicks to get something done in Vista, as it does in XP (at least for the settings I tried playing with).

I added Windows 7 (and Ubuntu 10.04) to my HDD and kept XP.
I've got a powerful PC now and the speedier Windows 7 (double bonus).

I've seen other comments saying that WMP 11 is/was good.

I've never tried it.
When I was extolling the features of a certain browser toolbar, WMP 11 stopped it from working properly on my friend's Vista laptop.
My friend had installed the toolbar, because I said it was good.
As a result, I never upgraded WMP 10 to WMP 11 (on my XP partition).

I've seen articles saying that you can install WMP 11 on a Windows 7 PC, however I've also read comments from other people, saying that they couldn't get it to work.

I've installed WMP 11 in Windows 7 32-bit and although most of the kinks were indeed worked out however, the one major drawback at least for me was that whenever you tried to use the "Add to playlist" function without WMP already being open, it would stall in opening the file and error out.

But I do use WMP simply because it's easy to use, manages my library easily and is an all-in-one audio/video player and can also server as a picture viewer and provides DLNA functionality for my other media devices around the house. The only oddity is streaming MKV as I can't forward or rewind but that's for another thread. I've tried other media players and they just don't quite fit the bill for me like WMP with the Shark 007 codecs. Although WMP 12 does not have a UI I particularly like, I still find it easier to use than most other players I've tried. And to be honest, the one feature it has that I like about it over almost any other media player I've tried is the integrated SRS WOW effects.

As far as horror stories, I remember Musicmatch Jukebox ... version 5 I think as it was around 2000. I even bought it for $50 so I could burn CDs with it. What a piece of crap player that was with a slow, clunky, horrible UI. I also tried Real Player around that time and still quite a crappy player. Another one that just never seems to work quite right and has a lot of performance issues in Windows are iTunes and QuickTime Player. Although now on my Core i3, they certainly are quite snappier but they've never approached that level on any more modest machines with older Pentium Ds and Pentium 4s that I've tried.

The media players that I have tried in Ubuntu are awful too.

Additional

Evols said:

I'm in the process of setting up XBMC. I've heard really great things about it and so far I'm really liking it. My PC is at the center of my HT/Media environment and I'm really looking for a program that effectively manages all my media needs.

Having said that, I'm really curious to know what other peoples media environments look like[physical set-up]. Is there a thread like this that someone knows of?

Have you tried the Media Center section?
https://www.sevenforums.com/media-center/