And a toy light bar whose brightness and duration cannot be controlled (which sucks precious battery life) and is an insult to the "Pro" name. Are there any serious options available?
The battery life for the TouchBar MacBook Pro is almost identical to the non TouchBar version.
And I am actually really surprised by all of the hate for TouchBar. If you use it with a tool like BetterTouchTool (which allows you to define shortcut sequences) it's really quite powerful. Once Apple brings the Shortcuts app to OSX you can be sure people will find it useful.
But for people who use applications like Final Cut Pro X, you can actually do a lot with it.
Here's a course on it, for example :
https://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/final-cut-pro-fasttrack...