You could consider separating the video quality settings from audio quality settings, since audio quality is far more important than video for some content.
There are Music and Performance streams and such where we're interested in listening to the sound more that looking at text / faces / fine details.

• New show hosts frequently receive advice to invest in buying better audio equipment to improve audio quality before looking to buy more expensive cameras. This is because people will tolerate bad video in a show much more than bad audio (although 160p is still kinda bad).

• I've listened to several streams where notes seem out of pitch and the stream chat/host think it's probably compression. It seems to be worse at 360p or 480p quality than at higher.

You might just want to do another round of quality testing on the audio compression.

(I'm not actually sure whether audio is actually compressed any further/differently at different quality levels but it seems to be.) The problem might be when broadcasting audio that has already been compressed, like by apple music or youtube?

Some streams you could mute and watch at high quality, other streams you could play in a secondary browser tab and presumably not require data for video that you're not watching, and I think the chat window might pop-out somewhere if you just wanted to follow that without watching the show, but there might be a problem with trying to listen to high-fidelity/quality audio without stuttering.

The video player will buffer causing a long "Latency To Broadcaster" when the streamer has intermittent connectivity issues. For desktop streamers this is usually not a problem. This is a nuisance for viewers watching IRL streamers who are streaming on less reliable mobile connections. Who wants to watch a stream where the "Latency To Broadcaster" is over 30s? or even 10s?

I have to open the "Video Stats" menu with every stream I watch to keep an eye on the "Latency To Broadcaster" to make sure I'm not too far behind the live stream. Nothing wrong with my internet connection. Problem is on the streamer side because they are on mobile. Twitch has made the viewing experience worse by making the "Video Stats" box even bigger that's not even transparent with the latest site updates. I understand some viewers will always have high latency issues due to poor internet service. But for viewers that want to say close to the live stream we should have that option.

1. Give viewers a live button similar to youtube to skip closer to the live stream... not sure why twitch hasn't copied this basic feature yet

2. Allow viewers to customize contents of the "Video Stats" box... so viewers can just display "Latency To Broadcaster"

3. Have an option in the video player where viewers can set the maximum "Latency To Broadcaster"... if the latency falls over 10s the player will automatically skip to the live stream... Ideally I never like to be over 5s from the live stream for streamers that have enabled "Low Latency"

I really like the 'Pause Chat' feature. But the overlay indicator message that says that chat is currently paused, although already changed a bit, is still covering the last message / chatter name. So we can neither click the name nor click all the mod icons (at least when timestamps are on).
Of course this is only a problem when chat is slow, but turning the entire feature on and off depending on peaks is quite impractical.

I would propose that this indicator shows up as the background of the chatbox. In a way that we could still type messages when chat is paused, but still have full access to every message.

I've been uploading old vods for the purpose of vodcasting on a channel I'm editor for for the last week, and long muted sections have been a recurring problem. It takes hours to upload and process a vod, just to find out that long sections are muted and there's nothing I can do about them at vodcast time.

Some suggestions
1. When vods are vodcasted, play them unmuted (since they aren't archived anyway and are essentially canned live broadcasts)
2. Allow a way to quickly remove muted sections from a vod
3. Provide editors the ability to fast-forward through vods being vodcast
4. At least allow editors to see which songs are causing the mute