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.

Remember when everyone swore you had to power stretch every job no matter what? I was the same way for years and would drag that thing into closets and tiny bathrooms. Then I did a repair in a hallway where a knee kicker got the carpet tight in five minutes and the power stretcher would have taken me half an hour with all the setup. It made me realize the tool matters less than what the room actually needs. My uncle's rule made sense when he was training me because he did not want me cutting corners on big open rooms. But calling a kicker a hack tool for every single job is just wrong.