[jchw]

Yeah, there are increasingly more situations where the simple mnemonics no longer work and you now need to use the more advanced uniform syntax for specifying devices. The same is true, IIRC, of specifying sound card hardware: in the past it used to be one argument to enable Soundblaster emulation outputting to the default sound output on the host, now I'm pretty sure it's split in two. The more "advanced" options totally make sense, but dropping or limiting the simpler options feels like a shame given how handy the qemu CLI can be.

That said, while they can be annoying, there haven't been an enormous amount of these changes, which is why I liken it to FFmpeg, I still use the FFmpeg CLI all the time even though the CLI syntax for more advanced filtering has changed over time.