Given how CD/DVD/BluRay went out of mainstream, I think the more typical use case is "I want the file smaller, while retaiming FullHD, HD, SD quality" for archival / streaming, for which the profiles are fine.
> "I want the file smaller, while retaiming [sic] FullHD, HD, SD quality"
The problem is that "retaining X quality" is extremely vague and subjective. Also, a lot of people conflate resolution with quality (see YIFY Torrents). While yes, you need enough pixels to have reasonable quality, if the encoder set CRF to 50, 8K video won't save you.
Handbrake gives you no indication whatsoever what quality you are getting at the end of the day. Even though it's technically possible to do many things in that regard (make previous of different compression rates and let the user decide, or draw comparison of video clips before and after compression highlighting where the image details are lost, etc...).
There's very little that is user-friendly in Handbrake.
you're conflating user-friendliness with user power and capability.
An app can be very user friendly, but does not give the user the power they didnt know they wanted. This is what handbrake is - you get a nice GUI, you get to choose from a list of presets (unless you know what you're doing and customize it). Then you click go - you can even queue up more files.
Someone who is using handbrake is not going to learn the command line. How would they know how to queue up ffmpeg? Don't say batch scripts, because that's not something a normal user would use.
It might surprise you to learn computers are not magic...
I’ve used the CLI tool for a lot of my media library and it really isn’t that hard, there are even wrapper scripts in GitHub that simplify the whole thing and are easier than handbrake
