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FFMPEG's API is perfect for what it aims to provide. Not every program is built for every use-case. It's trivial to create helper scripts to provide a simpler API for simple tasks, in fact this is probably how FFMPEG and ImageMagick are most often used; in image, video editing programs and servers.

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FFMPEG's API is far from perfect. In order to work with a video in a memory buffer you literally have to write part of a virtual filesystem driver. That is not perfect API design. You should just let me pass in a memory buffer and length. I am not really bothered with how verbose it can be since it is rather low level. What I am bothered by are undocumented pitfalls in demuxing, decoding, and handling color spaces. Ideally their should be an API that handles taking care of all the pitfalls correctly or there should be documentation explaining the pitfalls and how to avoid them.

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