Free software scares normal people

People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you understand exactly what you want, and correspondingly can manipulate a tool like handbrake to get it, or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. A software that appeals to the weird purgatory in the middle necessarily has a very limited audience. In practice, this small audience is served by websites. Someone searches "convert x to y" and a website comes up that does the conversion. Knowing some specialized software that does that task (and only that one narrow task) puts you so far into the domain of the specialist that you can manage to figure out a specialist tool.

For this example:

> we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file

Why are you arriving at the conclusion that this requires complex software, rather than just a simple UI that says "Drop video file here" and "Fix It" below? E.g., instead of your conclusion "stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works", another possibility is the simple UI I described? That seemed to me the point of the post.

The issue is that downloading a software, for most people, implies an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task. If I'm going out of my way to download something, then I'm probably willing to learn a few knobs that give me more control. Hence why I suggested that such a person would rather use a website.

This is really just my read for why this sort of software isn't more common. Go ahead and make it, and if it ends up being popular I'll look the fool.