If that feature would introduce a need to reactor or re-architect major parts of the the logic since everything has been built with the purpose of the playing video forwards supporting as many codecs as possible. Then, yes. And as a long time user of vlc video playback (and transcoding) I have never wanted to go back one frame. I always wanted to go back like 15 seconds, and that has worked forever.
Sure but that's completely different than claiming that it's out of scope or technically impossible. And that's completely different than your earlier example of implementing 3d rendering or something like that. They could just say that they don't want to do the feature, I think the pain point here is the claim that it is not possible.
Of course it's possible, that's my point. Both the maintainer and the requestors should avoid that word. The real questions are. Is it reasonable? Is it worth it? Is it along the lines of the problems the software set out to solve?
So you've never paused a video to figure out what's going on with a transition of piece of motion, or to try to get the perfect screenshot? OK, but that doesn't make other people's way of using video players invalid.
VLC supports seeking to arbitraty time points (as long as the codec provides the neccassry data). Adding seeking to specific frames on top of that is hardly scope bloat.
