I miss VCRs. Yeah the image quality is poor next to BluRay or even standard DVDs, but I don't really care about that and the usability is much simpler. As you said, skipping previews is easy, there is no region locking, and the tapes themselves are in my experience much more durable. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to spend five minutes cleaning a DVD to get it to play without skipping or freezing. And I've easily lost hundreds of dollars worth of purchased DVDs due to scratches (I have kids). VHS tapes on the other hand never gave me any problems and always worked.
Maybe no region lock, but the fragmentation between NTSC, PAL and SECAM means the situation was the same.
It was worse actually because it's easy to find a DVD reader that ignore zones, but if you had a NTSC tape in a PAL country the only solution was to import a NTSC VCR from abroad.
And sorry but I completely disagree on quality; maybe VHS is more kid-proof (as long as they don't figure out how to open it and pull the tape), but a DVD correctly handled will last forever while a VHS degrade over time, especially when you play it often. And if you pause the VCR for too long it's even worse.
>DVD correctly handled will last forever while a VHS degrade over time, especially when you play it often
True, but a mangled VHS can be still be recovered. The analog nature of the degradation means that VHS is still somewhat usuable, whereas damaged DVDs are often useless.
For many people there is also a huge nostalgia factor at play.
Yeah sure, there is probably specialized equipment for recovery too. It just doesn't really compare to pulling the tape out of a shattered VHS cassette, taping it together, respooling on another cassette and getting something playable.
As I mentioned in another comment, some of my thoughts on these kind of advantages are probably rooted in nostalgia :)
