I don't mind that vlc is build with support for samba, I just don't want to install samba because I don't want to use those extra features of vlc that needs samba. Therefore I think there should be a difference between which packages are needed for basic features, and which packages are only needed ...

I just installed vlc and was surprised it pulled in samba. I'm very sure vlc works great without samba - as long as you don't want to use it as a mediaserver (or whatever samba was meant for). I think it should be 'recommended' but not 'required'. It was of course easy to remove samba afterwards ...