Ok I'm going to start off with saying I don't know very much. So I'll try the best I can to describe my situation. I'll also try to only include as much information as necessary, so if there are any questions please ask.
I see that skins can be customized... Is that just a player customization of existing elements? My real question: is it possible to create a skin that includes new buttons and can be configured to call new functions within VLC? I realize that I would have to add these new functions to VLC. (Maybe one day they will be included upstream, but that's pushing it.) For now I just have a local copy of VLC that I hope to modify.