No idea where you see disdain, and I certainly haven't taken anything back. Progress bars are inaccurate, in the sense that they're simply not a good way to convey accurate information about task completion to a human user. Them's just facts.
But that's not bad. I said it was a nice scam. Sometimes it's good to be fooled. Putting a minigame during the load screen doesn't make the real game load any faster, but it makes the time seem to pass faster, and that's nice. Doesn't make it not fooling.
As for streaming video, as I said already, a video buffer indicator is tied to a UI element in the timeline. It tells me where I can scrub to in the timeline and have it play video immediately without buffering. That's useful.
It's not useful as a progress indicator, for telling me how much longer I need to wait to watch the video-- because my computer is way, way better at doing that math than I am. I would much rather have a simple indicator that tells me, given my current download speed, whether I will have to wait for buffering before it finishes playing, and if so, how long I have to wait until that is not the case. In fairness, you can get a decent idea of that based on whether or not the buffer indicator is advancing away from the playhead, which is another detail that distinguishes a streaming buffer from other sorts of progress indicators.
But that's not bad. I said it was a nice scam. Sometimes it's good to be fooled. Putting a minigame during the load screen doesn't make the real game load any faster, but it makes the time seem to pass faster, and that's nice. Doesn't make it not fooling.
As for streaming video, as I said already, a video buffer indicator is tied to a UI element in the timeline. It tells me where I can scrub to in the timeline and have it play video immediately without buffering. That's useful.
It's not useful as a progress indicator, for telling me how much longer I need to wait to watch the video-- because my computer is way, way better at doing that math than I am. I would much rather have a simple indicator that tells me, given my current download speed, whether I will have to wait for buffering before it finishes playing, and if so, how long I have to wait until that is not the case. In fairness, you can get a decent idea of that based on whether or not the buffer indicator is advancing away from the playhead, which is another detail that distinguishes a streaming buffer from other sorts of progress indicators.