I share the sentiment, even with fond memories of foobar2000/winamp/audacious, I've gone the route of just resorting to a "simpler" setup, just a collection of shell scripts to manage mpv to play my files from my disk/shares/http
Noted! that was not by far the purpose, at least made some laughs. I've tried to lower the amount of acronyms in the About and Overview section, adding links to the relevant pages that describe the acronyms, however, it's rather difficult to remove the acronyms without losing the meaning. thanks for the feedback.
I use mpv + mpvc, started using it heavily a couple of years ago.
Eventually, I started implementing features I was missing such as play,
and search Youtube music, manage playlists/playstate, minimal TUI, fzf
support, an equalizer. And last year decided to publish the changes on https://github.com/gmt4/mpvc/. I try to keep a log of the features I miss/implement at https://gmt4.github.io/mpvc/logbook.html.
Just came here to chime that I've been playing with mpv + fzf + notify-send, and as a result mpvc-tui has got now some cool fuzzy search + desktop notifications. I've included a bunch of screenshots showing the updates at: https://gmt4.github.io/mpvc/
That's definitely worth keeping an eye on, but actually its not that bad.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I only have a user view, not mpv developer. I consider the JSON IPC API quite stable, well documented through mpv(1) and https://mpv.io/manual/stable/. Almost every command-line option documented in mpv(1) is mapped 1:1 to the JSON IPC, so mpv(1) documents both the command-line, and, the JSON IPC.
The MPD & its clients are quite more complete, providing features such as: media library, indexing, extended searches, tags. etc.
Instead mpvc is just a simple client that provides a mpc-like interface, and communicates with the mpv running on the same machine over a Unix Socket. So YMMV depending on how many MPD features you require.
This is how it looks on macOS, and Linux:
https://gmt4.github.io/mpvc/assets/mpvc-fzf-mac.jpg
https://gmt4.github.io/mpvc/