That is more than I can reply to in a quick shot silver..........a lot of collected thoughts there.
On the VCD - I take that to mean Video CD? No I haven't tried that.
I just recently was able to find a command to burn a whole distribution ISO to a DVD disk in one shot, though a made I lot of coasters trying that with K3B.
It has been frustrating in a lot of ways, especially when those front end programs won't do what their GUI check boxes say they will.
K3B is certainly one of those examples.
But I've learned plenty by sorting through those frustrations also.
The make DVD command (for anyone curious) is growisofiles with a "Z" option and output directed straight to your burner device as "direct data" or "dd".
From the command line it works like magic with no front end involved, and I have become accustomed to watching progress by checking the active lights on the actual hardware items as opposed to watching a progress bar on a GUI.
I see that as the unfinished side of GNU software. Of course if I wanted to go through program associations of K3B's front end GUI and change it's associated scripts with the underlying working programs - like cdrecord, mkisofiles, womin etc. I would be able to - and with enough tweaking the front end could be made to work.
But out of the box it doesn't. And it is frustrating.
That's the real big upside of open software as I see it though. I'm allowed to get under the hood and change it to my liking (never mind that I have to) there's no "install wizard" - that's your job in GNU/Linux.
If a piece of software you want doesn't work right out of the box it's perfectly alright, in fact encouraged, that you change and tweak it so it works for you.
I am well aware most folks won't do that or even care, and if I'd had to learn enough bash scripting to make that happen on my own - I'd
still be waiting for a bootable disk. However (with respect to the ISO example) a little google searching got me to the script I needed, and it actually is fun to copy and paste a piece of script code from a web page into a terminal, edit for your own hardware, hit return, and watch it burn a disk
What I do like about running Linux with respect to that (all of the above) is that all the tools I need to do those jobs are already in the software - they're just available from the command line
only in many cases, and I have to find them - It's something I've gotten used to.
Yes it take takes time.
For anyone to to perform the Christmas morning picture/music composite upload you mentioned simply requires the end user to keep
way too much in active memory.
And that does get me riled.
I expect the computer to do that most of the time
for me.........and in that respect GNU/Linux software distro's just aren't there yet.
I think the the biggest reason I persist with all this is the UI/UE interface stuff though.
I love KDE. No, really.
I step up to a windows desktop and I can almost feel the heavy cumbersome pieces clunk and grind as it goes about it's work.
KDE is a surgeons scalpel, a fighter jet, a laser beam and an FZR on full boil all rolled into one. Need another work space? Three clicks and it's there -
and fully functional.
M/S power tools won't do that - I've checked.
I cannot give that up......................
BTW I've taken to being strictly a slackware geek. I too have done distro hopping in hopes of finding an well automated functional Linux flavor.
Ubuntu is
so close.
I still prefer the hands on approach of slackware myself, with the functionality of the new kernels it's getting hard to tell distro's apart anymore. Slack 12.1 pretty much just works.
Ok, that's enough from me for now.
silly rabbits pc's are for kids.. 
