A note on programming philosophy and image formats. These utilities are written in the tradition of having programs that do one thing and (try to) do it well. For this reason the idea is to have a lot of small programs rather than a few big ones that can do everything. As to image formats, there are a lot of image formats they have their strengths and weaknesses. Since I have access to things like ImageMagick and netpbm+, I see little reason to support a lot of image formats directly. The choices I have made are pbm, pgm, and ppm (tying directly to the ideas of netpbm+ which uses these formats as intermediate formats). As a result most require the presence of libnetpbm to compile/run.
My view on open source software is that if you are unsatisfied with a piece of software, you can let the creator know about it. Don't expect them to do anything about your concerns. They probably care, but they have their own priorities and reasons for doing things. If your concerns are not sufficiently addressed and you have the ability, then fix things so they fit with your ideas.