[Karellen]

But, my option 1, why doesn't it work?

It was never coded to work that way. The UniqueID can be unreliable. Many, many people use Media Managers that don't set the UniqueID correctly. Many use a "default" value so the scraper has no idea what the ID is, others may set the IMDB or TheMovieDB id, so it becomes messy quite quickly. The most reliable and accurate way is using the URL. If you have the URL, then you know the page exists as you most likely looked it up to obtain the URL.