I don't disagree with your opening sentence, but your premise is likely based on an incomplete understanding.
The FFmpeg project produces libraries for handling digital multimedia, and it also offers a command line application. Handbrake, on the other hand, is a GUI-based application meant for DVD ripping and video transcoding. These two projects may appear to share many goals, but there is little end-user overlap and they serve quite different purposes. And I might add -- both projects are _outstanding_.
Handbrake has a specific set of tasks on which it focuses. FFmpeg, on the other hand, endeavors to provide a powerful set of multimedia codecs, container handling libraries, codec- and bitstream-level filters, a high-performance scaler, etc.
In other words, FFmpeg's command line application is meant to be used by power users who know exactly what they are trying to do and what they need done to their files to produce that outcome. Handbrake, despite its extensive feature set, simply does not expose the low-level functionality that FFmpeg/libav does. Under the hood, a lot is going on in Handbrake about which the user is totally unaware.
To take an example from the OP -- in order to avoid faulty initiation of an audio track in a video, an FFmpeg user must explicitly rebuild the output container's time base. If the team is not knowledgeable in these lower-level areas of digital media, then it seems totally logical for them to use Handbrake. Handbrake will auto-detect the need to do this process for each individual source and implement it without even informing the user in its log output.
The FFmpeg project is not responsible for teaching software developers about the fundamentals of digital multimedia, and it is not a 'bug' that they don't do so.
The FFmpeg project produces libraries for handling digital multimedia, and it also offers a command line application. Handbrake, on the other hand, is a GUI-based application meant for DVD ripping and video transcoding. These two projects may appear to share many goals, but there is little end-user overlap and they serve quite different purposes. And I might add -- both projects are _outstanding_.
Handbrake has a specific set of tasks on which it focuses. FFmpeg, on the other hand, endeavors to provide a powerful set of multimedia codecs, container handling libraries, codec- and bitstream-level filters, a high-performance scaler, etc.
In other words, FFmpeg's command line application is meant to be used by power users who know exactly what they are trying to do and what they need done to their files to produce that outcome. Handbrake, despite its extensive feature set, simply does not expose the low-level functionality that FFmpeg/libav does. Under the hood, a lot is going on in Handbrake about which the user is totally unaware.
To take an example from the OP -- in order to avoid faulty initiation of an audio track in a video, an FFmpeg user must explicitly rebuild the output container's time base. If the team is not knowledgeable in these lower-level areas of digital media, then it seems totally logical for them to use Handbrake. Handbrake will auto-detect the need to do this process for each individual source and implement it without even informing the user in its log output.
The FFmpeg project is not responsible for teaching software developers about the fundamentals of digital multimedia, and it is not a 'bug' that they don't do so.