libvirt-the-software is tens of thousands of lines of complex code that doesn't really add much. libvirt-the-project does contribute patches in to qemu, and a

libvirt-the-software is tens of thousands of lines of complex code that doesn't really add much. libvirt-the-project does contribute patches in to qemu, and a lot of the reason that libvirt-the-software doesn't add much of value is because libvirt-the-project worked to get capabilities in to upstream qemu. The libvirt team definitely does view qemu as malleable, and bends it to their needs. The problem is that the libvirt authors contributing to qemu look at qemu as a machine-interface (to be consumed by libvirt), not as a human-interface. Many of the more poorly documented or otherwise difficult-for-humans flags were contributed by the libvirt team. And they're useful! They make it so qemu can do things it couldn't do before. But they're also kinda the reason qemu is difficult to use without libvirt.