I wouldn't say we "suffered with VHS" since VHS actually has higher resolution (it records the full 480/576 vertical lines of broadcast TV, with horizontal resolution similar to VCD), VHS tapes could hold 2-8 hours (vs 74-80 minutes for VCD, not even enough for a standard "feature length" film), and you could record your own VHS tapes (which was the original selling point of home VCRs, not pre-recorded tapes; by the time CD recorders became cheap DVD was already released).
"In modern-day digital terminology, NTSC VHS is roughly equivalent to 333×480 [...] while PAL VHS offers the equivalent of about 335×576 [...] S-VHS improved the horizontal luminance resolution to 400 lines"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
I'm well aware of these "benefits" you speak of, but it was still a crap format for video. If you were satisfied with VHS, then I'm happy for you. However, VHS was the absolute worst video format. It was the penultimate example of how end users did not compare about quality. Early YouTube also demonstrated this. Laser Discs required flipping over. VCDs required a second disc. First gen DVDs were DVD-10s which required flipping over (until they eventually got DVD-9s working).
Even with VCD being half the resolution of the SD image, it was still a much better image than VHS could ever do.
VHS has a similar horizontal resolution to VCD (VHS has 240 lines per picture height, or about 320 lines across the whole width, while VCD has 352 pixels across the whole width) but has double the vertical resolution (and since it's an interlaced format, that also means it has double the temporal resolution). Take some interlaced 60Hz sports footage and convert it to VCD, and if you can tell me with a straight face that the VCD looks better, then I'll tell you that you're blind.
