More than an hour? That's very strange, enough that I wonder if you had the right impression of things.
Usually the reason to go with command line is that even though it might be bewildering to look at, slamming in the command only takes a moment and you don't need to do any button-hunting.
It's a tradeoff, is what I'm saying. But you seem to be describing a situation where it's significantly worse in every way. Why would a bunch of people all be on that bad plan?
That's usually how long it takes me to get an FFMPEG command I'm planning to use more than once right
If you give someone an already-done ffmpeg command it should be straightforward to use.