Everytime I rented a video on DVD, they were scratched. Renting DVDs was always an uncertain experience of not knowing whether I would see the whole movie or not. Often times entire scenes would just drop. Great technology, horrible implementation.
VHS was big, clunky, complicated and reliable. I never doubted it. Sure the quality was not as good, but if you were watching the movie for the first time, you didn’t care. It was consistent crap quality and I much preferred it over DVD.
I feel like this is a rose-colored memory. I had VCRs eat and destroy multiple VHS tapes to a point where they became unwatchable.
DVDs could get scratched, but usually you didn't have to worry about the player killing the movie, and generally even when the movie got scratched it would still work for me.
By like 2002, DVDs became so cheap to order ($2-$8 per) that most movie rental places would replace them if a user reported one as scratched. It often paid for itself in a single rental.
I recall it depended a lot on what DVD player you got. Some would play through scratched DVDs merely skipping over the bad parts, others would stutter through the bad parts while some would just stop. Interestingly enough it was often the cheaper Chinese brands that would handle the bad DVDs better than the more expensive brands (but not always!). Luckily the players I had were always pretty good so I could play pretty much any DVD movie without any trouble.
VHS was big, clunky, complicated and reliable. I never doubted it. Sure the quality was not as good, but if you were watching the movie for the first time, you didn’t care. It was consistent crap quality and I much preferred it over DVD.