Or just grab anything that isn't  AV1.

TLDR: Everybody deserves to try Opus 5.1 Surround sound if they want! Use what you want, but at your own risk. Imagine showing someone pictures of your dog and they tell you the cat in the pictures look weird. What's wrong here, the dog or the person looking at the pictures?

As long as users are aware of the technical limitations of their software and willingly use it with that understanding, there is no issue at all. However that is rarely the case with VLC and its plethora of users. Granted, a majority of all VLC users will not experience or notice issues with their playback and assume the blame lies with the data itself. Some users willfully enjoy a degraded experience on VLC knowing full well that the minor issues and annoyances they experience could be resolved with a different software solution. They may have a really good reason to choose this experience. To each their own. But it becomes an issue when people without this understanding come to blame the data. This analogy is a bit of a stretch but all these words we spew here are boring without it: Imagine trying to use your key on your neighbors door and blaming the locksmith for selling you a faulty key.

We see this time and time again here and in passing conversations elsewhere. Take this Opus 5.1 Surround issue for instance; A user encounters the issue playing a release with only Opus 5.1 Surround audio tracks and no alternative 7.1 or 2.0 tracks provided and so they decide to use another release with entirely different components. They notice the issue is "resolved" but for what reason exactly? Was it the shorter filename or the software they use to play it? Was it the video codec? Was it the bit-depth? The color/format metadata? Was it the container? Or how about the use of zlib compressed subtitles? Users will change 10 variables at a time and attribute the issue to what they believe is the culprit without verifying or understanding why the issue occurred in the first place. Although we are reluctant to hand VLC and their developers an excuse for these long-standing issues, it's likely that most of their users are not testing every single one of these variables in isolation to truly find the root cause - and it would be unreasonable to expect end-users to take such a task.

We diverged from the initial point a bit there, so we'll get back on track. Even if most people don't care about 5.1 Surround, they won't be able to playback some releases that provide only Opus 5.1 Surround tracks. So in that sense, they will care. Informing people that there are solutions to the problems they're having is more helpful than dogpiling on some specific thing. It's important for people to have options and the freedom to choose based on preference and not just what their hardware or software setup arbitrarily limits them to.

Here is the VLC regression with Opus audio in the latest version (3.0.21). It's nice to see that they resolved the issue but there has been no new version update with the fix to finally put the complaints about this issue to rest. There are other issues outlined in a link on one of the other comments. Anecdotally, we often see reports of subtitles being improperly displayed by VLC. The issue could be minor or completely breaking.

Have a nice day,
- SavI0r