Also, they keep your passport for a few days, then send it through the mail.
I'm still lucky to live a couple hours drive from the nearest consulate. Brazil is a big country, and for many the consulate visit is a travel event in itself.
And the practicalities are also a problem: going through this visa process again with wife and kid, is the stuff nightmares are made of.
(The UK-style visa, which just took a couple questions at Heathrow, is ok. It is almost the anti-visa: you get a free pass for 6 months, and the "visa" line was no longer than Brazilian passport check upon return!)
I lost two full days on USA visa because the photo was taken at a different place to "speed up" things. I got my visa at Recife, said to be less crowded than São Paulo embassy (which was the nearest for me, "just" 600km), so I scheduled the visa interview in a business trip to a place "nearby" Recife (300km...).
I got the visa because my employer paid the ancilliary expenses back then and there was an expectation to go to USA, in the end I didn't go, and hopefully the visa renewal does not need me to go to an embassy.
I actually may go to Brazil for the first time this (northern hemisphere) winter. I will be traveling on my "other" passport since there is no need for a paid visa.
We travel other places that have decent public transportation and reasonable functioning healthcare systems.
The process was really frightening for my children. I remember my daughter had an small water bottle and an officer yelled like if she was a terrorist.
Fortunately we got a turist visa for 10 years.
In addition to requiring a considerably smaller amount of personal data and fewer travel details, Brazilian consulates in the United States don't require an interview for visa applicants from the U.S., and in fact don't even require the applicant to be present in person at all. You can, for example, give your passport to a visa expediter who can deliver it along with your visa paperwork to the consulate and pick it up for you afterward. (An example—among several—is https://www.traveldocs.com/.) So, you don't necessarily have to travel to the consulate at all.
If you do travel to the consulate, you might wait for about an hour and be asked largely pro-forma questions about the nature of your travel.
Source: I'm U.S. passport holder who's obtained three Brazilian visas and helped other Americans with their Brazilian visa applications.
It will go as low process as only verifying the foreign documents at the border against a known criminal list, and as high process as demanding an entire day at the embassy on the specific case of the US.
I've obtained three Brazilian visas and witnessed other Americans obtain them, and I've never seen anyone have to spend a full day at the consulate. In fact, we can request them through visa expediters without appearing at a consulate in person at all.