Thanks.
I often find that my dry sense of humor and tendency toward the inane lead to a delivery that falls short, coming across somewhere between absurdist humor and some sort of ironic reality, when received by other people. These sorts of attempts at subtle comedy typically result from thoughts provoked by something that was completely serious but I found funny. (Take for example my "peanut buttor vector display" I spent entirely too much time on ( https://github.com/scottvr/PBVD/wiki/Ch-1.-PBVD-%E2%80%90-Th... ), which was inspired by a real news article about edible robots where the inventors were talking about receiving grants for sustainability research or some such, so PBVD made me (and only me probably) laugh and its creation was both reactionary and entirely pointless... but I digress..)
I don't think I need to enumerate the points of amusement and commentary I was trying to manifest into existence by making wtffmpeg. It's not that the audience is daft, it's that the comedian isn't funny.
In the big picture, and to this specific post's point - from all the "lolol that's so dumb because" comments I suppose I can call it a success because even if they think they're laughing at me, and it's not the level I'd hoped to reach people, at least it generated laughter. Not unlike the servo-controlled arm I made to "hand"-write the Bible on paper - a critic might focus on the fact that it is not a very good robot, and that there is no need for it to do what it does and entirely miss the intended commentary on technical progress (the invention of the printing press putting biblical scribes out of work, Gutenberg, etc) and I think some of my failure to hit target comes from the fact that these sorts projects technically function, if not perfectly well, distracting from the obvious humor or social-commentary context. This reply has gotten long enough and the list of misunderstood projects coming to mind keeps growing causing me to realize that though I've thought I'm not bothered by such, chalking it up to being "niche", maybe my failure to connect and deliver is at least mildly troubling to me. Lol. shrug
Tangentially related, I have a tendency sometimes to litter my written communications with ASCII winky faces to ensure people know when I'm kidding about something because to my surprise and chagrin, I am often misinterpreted. Again I digress. And thanks again for the thoughtful comment. Your mention of clear intentions resonates.