Well, that is true that RHEL and CentOS are not used a lot by the developers, however, last time I checked on the latest RHEL, I was able to install it...
Using the rpm from livna.
The fact that noone helps us to maintain the packages is NOT our fault, and the fact that RHEL/CentOS repositories and rpms are a mess is not our fault either.
There are a lot of questions about livna RPMs and a lot of them are solved at the end of the thread.
viewtopic.php?t=31880&highlight=livna
Anyway VLC has a modular approach and the GUIs are just one of the modules. Therefore VLC is not at all GUI-centric as you seem to say. There are at least four different interface that are not GUIs.
For example, on debian, you have vlc-noX, which is just the VLC without the guis, the fact that it does not exist on your particular distribution is that people don't care enough to do it. And still that is not our fault.
Come on, no one is paid, there is no foundation, we have no money and we work just on free time, do you really think we should put a lot of extra time just for a distribution we can't even afford to pay ?
About VLC and solaris, just to end my answer, yes, some people have done it in the past and one person is just doing it now for the recent trunk.