Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. I was amazed to see somebody has actually went implementing this idea (as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku)
> As an aside, MP3 is a format which requires licensing for decoding and encoding to be legal,so depending on the MP3 format is not a good idea unless your program deals specifically with it.
This is not true, the patent has expired AFAIK and every desktop Linux distribution can play it out-of-the box for quite a long time already (and even if it would not have, people living in countries that don't have software patenting should be let to make use of their advantage). In fact MP3 is a great format to depend on as this is the only lossy audio compression format that really plays everywhere. AAC is better and can be played on the majority of modern devices and OSes but still not really everywhere, OPUS is the best but there still are so many devices and apps that don't support it unfortunately.