Its not just about video. Its about all the supporting libraries... starting with FreeSWITCH 1.6 most of the support deps there were in tree were removed because everyone complained about us carrying all those deps in tree... so we did what everyone wanted and thats started to depending on system libs... dont think 1.6 was just about video because it wasnt. there are littlerally 1000s of commits between 1.4 and 1.6 that are general improvement and bug fixes...
As far as the some people dont care about video, this is absolutely true. However, leaving out a list of features by definition leaves those packages not at feature parity with other platforms.
As far as whats in SD that is not an exhaustive list of deps thats just some of the ones we had to do to get things working on deb7, many still apply such as libvpx which no distro has a recent enough one.