For whom? When? There are decent applications for this, some of them even free.

I've seen fantastic fansubbing work, with beautifully rendered, animated subtitles; and that was already years ago.

Making basic SRT's is easily accomplished in a rudimentary program like the old Subtitle Workshop by URUSoft: http://subworkshop.sourceforge.net/

(Looks like those guy have been active lately and have some new stuff out: http://www.uruworks.net/index.html )

Burning subs into a video is easily done with a ffmpeg one-liner (using its "libass" renderer or whatever). (Someone nontechnical may need help putting together that oneliner, but after that it's just repetition.) It's generally a bad idea; don't hard sub if you can avoid it and make the video available without the hard subs.