Nothing but problems using snaps

Hi, I'm sorry but I haven't had a good experience with snaps at all. They just don't work. Here's some examples:

ffmpeg: the standard names of the programs aren't honored (ffplay, ffprobe etc) so I have so screw around with links manually or feed special code into my scripts that use these problems to get them to work

ffmpeg: streamio-ffmpeg gem doesn't work with some JSON Parser error but I'm pretty sure it's because ffprobe isn't where it's supposed to be.

ffmpeg: It won't run if my current working directory is on a separate hard drive than root or is in an Encfs partition because of the connection permissions. The correct connection doesn't seem to exist to make it work when I list all connections.

thunderbird: it flat out will not send an email. get some other illegible file permission error. Have no idea how to fix it. Used to work but not recently so something changed. All other mail clients send fine.

I've read a hundred "guides" "tutorials" man pages but I just can't get enough information to make things work easily. I'm really hoping it's just my stupidity and we can fix that easily...

If you think you have what I'm doing wrong let me know. I'm about to go back to manually building the apps since Ubuntu doesn't have newer versions, or features like nvidia hardware encoding already built.

Thanks!