In MPV you can litteraly use shaders and upscaler to improve significantly the image.
See : https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K https://github.com/butterw/bShaders https://artoriuz.github.io/blog/mpv_upscaling.html
VLC doesn't support shaders.
Other great stuff with MPV is change everything, from the UI to keyboard bind. And of course MPV is totaly usable with the command line (is better than use a gui btw, you can see the errors and other stuff).