That's fair, although the stuff I can do with ffmpeg filters amazes me, and I barely scratch the surface I tend to include the codec developers in the "ffmpeg

That's fair, although the stuff I can do with ffmpeg filters amazes me, and I barely scratch the surface I tend to include the codec developers in the "ffmpeg developers" for simplicity as there are many that work in both areas. The complexity in using those codecs isn't the ffmpeg command line, it's knowing which options to use.