It's really not, things can be powerful and easy to use. I'd even say some parts of ffmpeg are well designed in this way like `ffmpeg -i ./video.mp4 ./video.wav

It's really not, things can be powerful and easy to use. I'd even say some parts of ffmpeg are well designed in this way like `ffmpeg -i ./video.mp4 ./video.wav` working is well designed. Think the fact all the commands are shorthand doesn't help because no matter how many ffmpeg commands you copy and paste in your life unless you put the effort in you're not going to begin to remember what -an means in the sea of all the other two letter switches and the copywriting in the output and error messages is very hard to tell whats going wrong for someone who hasn't used it a long time. Not saying it should all be super wordy just that it's difficult to pick up things though osmosis when the commands look like this -ss -t -rc:v, respect to anyone who actually learnt how this works so they could type it without sitting there with the documentation and hitting a wall for an hour. Will say though the raw tech inside ffmpeg has always meant figuring out getting it to do the thing has always been worth it because it's insanely powerful.