and lose the ability to pipe, check exit status, run from cron, run through ssh or a different machine, call from other scripts...
The last couple of months as I know about more and more the command line, and can configure my shell and tools the way I like, I feel I'm more productive with the terminal than any other GUI application.
My main project is a mobile app that has a bunch of calculators dedicated to specific tasks. Some of this tasks are less-than-trivial, but most of them you'd not look a special tool for (for example VAT calculator). It has 950k downloads, most of its users are very happy with it. But every single time there's a review in the online press I get "this is for morons" comments. Every. Single. Time (unless it's a small blog that doesn't have commenters). When I saw Gooey, I had two thoughts: "Nice" and "Someone will surely try to make a point that this is stupid".
I'm surprised you have settled on using a thing you dislike which doesn't work for you, when there are likely dozens or hundreds of wrappers, GUIs, APIs, programs and apps for image bulk editing to choose from.
_Settling_ on a solution indicates that a task is performed more often. In such a case, CLI is perfectly fine, because you learn how to use it while you do it and this knowledge sticks after several uses. I haven't used IrfanView, but I doubt it can compete with all the goodness of the command line.
If you're building utilities for yourself, other programmers, or something which produces a result that you want capture and pipe over to another console application (e.g. nix philosophy utils), Gooey probably isn't the tool for you.
It's still helpful though for other scenarios.
Users assemble their workflows in a sharable, repeatable and somewhat easy-to-use way using the web-ified versions of their command-line tools. Galaxy takes care of hooking everything up (data, scripts, intermediate results, etc) and provides a UI for watching/controlling the resulting job(s) on the desired HPC cluster.
The goal for this in biology is to address the explosion in data modern biologists have to deal with nowadays - it's often completely overwhelming. Things like Galaxy increase both the accessibility of these command-line tools and also the large HPC compute resources traditionally dominated by users from the physical sciences.
Although it was a few years ago, it was rewarding seeing non-programmer users get onto HPC - importantly, while retaining control of their workflow - after they've struggled for so long on their local hardware. When you see jobs that took weeks or months run in hours or days, it's almost like giving a desert explorer some water.
Systems like Galaxy do require dedicated systems people to support it and make it properly sing though. Gooey could nicely accelerate the web-ification part of adding new software.
I've written more than a few GUIs that added up to wrappers around a command-line app, this would have been very handy then.