There's a continuum, and yes that applies to human languages, both natural and constructed, and to other skills. But where you can choose (so, not natural languages really) you can design things to make this easier, or, I guess, harder.
For example English orthography is a horrible mess. The inventory of squiggles needed to write English isn't too bad, but the correspondence between the words you know and the correct sequence of squiggles to write them is unnecessarily complicated. No benefit accrues to us from this, and in some other written languages it's much easier.
I'd place ffmpeg somewhere in the not-bad but not-great part of the continuum. As with English orthography of course the problem is if you change things with the intent to make them better you actually introduce a cost for existing users which may be impossible to sustain.
For example English orthography is a horrible mess. The inventory of squiggles needed to write English isn't too bad, but the correspondence between the words you know and the correct sequence of squiggles to write them is unnecessarily complicated. No benefit accrues to us from this, and in some other written languages it's much easier.
I'd place ffmpeg somewhere in the not-bad but not-great part of the continuum. As with English orthography of course the problem is if you change things with the intent to make them better you actually introduce a cost for existing users which may be impossible to sustain.