Secondly, I made bad experiences with removing WMP (using nLite).
While playing WMV files using, say, MPC, was no problem at all, some websites using embedded videos would not work anymore after all!
Unless you really don't need support for that media format anyway, I can only urge you to leave it in and simply just associate files with another player of your choice.
You can even remove the context menu entries of WMP and the like so it looks like it's gone but retain the core functionality.

Thirdly, I see that the language aspect has already been addressed...

Ask nicely and you never know, the programmers may look at it.