Man, I feel you on the sore arms. My grandma would've given me grief too, but sometimes you just have to make life easier for yourself. No shame in it after 15 years of doing it the hard way.

That hostel guy basically charged you 18 euros a day for free therapy...

Yeah the color bleed thing is the whole ballgame on those systems. Composite basically smears reds all over the place and once you see it on S-video you can't unsee it. The bigger point is that most N64 and SNES models can't even output real component without a mod, so people acting like it's a simple choice are kidding themselves. S-video was built for this era of hardware and it shows. Your Trinitron has a comb filter doing work on composite too, so if S-video looks better even on that set, that tells you everything.