I know what AVID is good at (bigger/complex projects). I know that many places use AVID, but reality is that in so many cases they use it because their editors know it and don't want to switch (similar story is with some Flame operators and NUKE). Another reason is that big places hate changes and many top positions are filled with "old" people who will blindly believe in eg. AVID and keep using/investing in it (regardless if there is anything better or not). It doesn't mean AVID is so great for every job. Not sure how latest version is improved but eg. 10 years ago AVID was so outdated and slow compared to competition, like Edius. Job which took in Edius 1h in AVID was half a day job mainly due to its poor rending speed (real cases not made up). There are TV station which use Edius (specially for news) as it's part of bigger GrassValey systems (not in UK though). Soho is a mafia which is outdated (although recently started to catch up)
I never use a single NLE, encoder etc. I always use tool which does job the best/simplest/quickest (unless it cost way to much for the job).
If there is a need to use ffmpeg on job I'll use it. There is absolutely no problem with it if you know what you are doing. If I give you 100 HD x1h ProRes masters and ask to replace end logo will you do it in AVID? I definitely would not (and had it done in 24h).
I had access to all best DVD/BD encoders. I even used different ones depending on the source nature. Most jobs were done with Cinemacraft and Blucode (which you probably never heard of). Scenarist is quite crap software to use (painful, outdated), but due to fact that there is nothing better (as no one is interested in providing tools for DVD/BD anymore) it's used in about every studio (specially for DVD). I authored 3000+ DVDs with it. At the end we had tools which were creating 80% of the project automatically and only some thing were done manually with Scenarist GUI.
Sorenson or Maincocept are toys, not a specialised encoders, specially when it comes to DVD or BD. Sonic's Cinevision was poor as well, which they knew, but played hard to hide (for MPEG2 and AVC). "Real" DVD/BD encoders are Cinemacraft. ATEME is a company which started on doom9 forum, which about no one remembers. They used "public" to create god AVC engine. They are not bad, but those are not really tools designed for BD use. People used it due to lack of good alternatives.
Sorry, but they way how you see pro world is so outdated. Problem with using ffmpeg? Do you know what is behind all internal BBC engines? Do you know how BBC creates DPP files? Days when being a pro= owning/using tools worth millions are gone long time ago. Autodesk has hard times to keep interest in Flame (I also worked for 2 year at top London's VFX house in R&D department). Reality force them to start renting it /Mac version (even if big places were very unhappy about as they paid huge money for each license).
Truth is that todays opens source tools in so many cases are way beyond any pro tools. Do you know what powers Vantage's h264 and h265 encoding? They replaced Mainconcept (which is just average) with x264 and x265. If you think that being pro = using overpriced (very often average or even crap) tools then you are sooooo wrong
It's the same as believing that AVID is best editor for every editing related job.
Another reality check- old days tweaking encode with segment re-encodingg etc. had some sense as client would pay and appreciate it. Today almost no one does it. Authoring pricing went so much down that it's all done quickly, just to push another title out (2006 = 30+ authoring houses in UK, today probably <5 ). Company where I worked simply gave up at some point (even if we had clients) as money was so poor it had no economical sense.
If I were to give a job to someone, all what I would care is their knowledge, not tool which they use. Using AVID etc. gives me no guarantee for end result at all. This actually became a massive problem- people without knowledge buying cheap Resolve (or even AVID ) thinking they are going to be kings of post
It became one of biggest problems in post industry.