from what I see, the onus of fixing it lies on the Microsoft side. And from what I know about Microsoft, they won't do a thing.

Are we just going to pretend Microsoft didn't do this in purpose? They see VLC as a far superior product to their own software, so they purposely made it run like shit to make morons like Blow here switch back to media player. This is pretty poor behaviour from what is supposed to be an operating system.