[sussmannbaka]

hmmm, I'll try. Think of these things like you think about using cli tools. If you ONLY had ffmpeg or imagemagick in isolation, there would be no benefit to using them on the command line. You are working with images and video after all. That's what GUI is for! Even if you end up using them, you use them through a GUI wrapper. I bet Resolve uses ffmpeg somewhere under the hood.

They don't work in isolation, though, and I bet you can easily think up a bunch of usecases for either. They're scriptable and they compose well, after all, so the tradeoff is worth it. You put up with the headache to automate that batch job of changing the intro sequence of the thousand video files and generate new thumbnails and put the new subtitles in one go.

In emacs, everything tends to be composable and scriptable. You are in GUI land but things feel powerful like in CLI land, except discoverable. It's the "vim is the text editor of the unix IDE" idea, except they put the whole unix into your editor. When people jokingly claim it's an OS they're only half joking. It's malleable. You are already running it. You are already familiar with the way it works, with the way you discover features, get help etc. Why start another program for a task like this?