They really did a great job.
There was a time (it started around MC12, and reached a crescendo with MC15) when the most common confusion here was over dealing with codecs and decoders and settings for video playback. I even wrote the old DirectShow Playback Guide trying to help people, and distill some of the "best practices" during that time.
It was frustrating. A bunch of us knew that it could work so brilliantly, but people were constantly having trouble due to various conflicting and misconfigured filters (mostly installed by poorly considered codec packs, or two, or three). We started to suggest that they solve this somehow. To make them more integrated (or build their own).
One of the most common suggestions we'd give to people was to install the CCCP codec pack, which often worked, but itself had trouble when other codecs and codec packs were installed. CCCP itself also wasn't perfect, and didn't always have the best choices for filters, or settings, so even then, some changes were required for optimal playback performance and compatibility (and it tied them largely to ffdshow, which was often flaky and the projects were fragmented with crazy builds coming from people on forums and all sorts of nonsense). And, even if it worked well, it forced people to use another third-party solution, which we couldn't properly support, to configure settings themselves. The filter configuration system in MC was a complex beast (it still is, if you put it in fully manual mode), and it confused everyone (even me sometimes). A few of us, here and again, suggested they build something to fix this. The name Red October is, I think, an oblique reference to... Well, CCCP itself. And the quest to escape the problems with CCCP (fleeing the fatherland, if you will)... And the hunt for
silence (here, on the forum). I'll admit,
I didn't think they could. But they did. And they gave it a clever name.