What's the joke? I thought using VFW in 2022 was pretty hillarious of a suggestion. Maybe you got the punchline confused? ;P

AVISynth died to me long long ago as it was just no longer pratical. The work arounds to get 10bit video was never stable by the time I dropped it.

I did enjoy the scripting aspect of things like you suggest, but that's meh at this point. Now that my brain has been rewired to think FFMPEG like, the frustration goes away. It's a steep hill to climb without question, but eventually, it just goes "click".

2. The closest equivalent to VFW in linux is not ffmpeg but gstreamer. My experience with the latter is ... not good.

3. ffmpeg is great when it does what you need but VFW lets you draw from a vast ocean of third party plugins that do all sorts of niche things.

1)yes, if you're not needing 10bit, then AVISynth is fun and does some amazing things. Even it's features of doing technical restoration were useful, but once you step into professional, the 8bit only really holds things back and it was time to move on. FYI, a lot of the AVISynth filters are now available in FFMPEG!

2)gstreamer compared to ffmpeg to me personally is like comparing GIMP to Photoshop (dropping commercial vs FOSS). Yes, GIMP can do nice things, but Photoshop does what I need and I know how to make it do it. No questions asked. Muscle memory. I'm at that point with FFMPEG.

3)I'm long past trying to do creative things CLI that those 3rd party plugins allowed. I'm utilitarian with workflows and need to churn it out, so ffmpeg plugs in the holes as if it were designed for it ;-) If I'm going creative, I'm in a nice UI and doing things. However, I'm not afraid to use CLI to generate some content to messing with later in a more interactive environment.