[yellowapple]

> After feedback from design we hard-coded it to a steadily increasing bar regardless of actual progress, and the complaints all stopped immediately.

This seems like a surefire way to end up with a progress bar at 8675309%, or a progress bar that gets to 100% and then sits there waiting for reality to catch up. And I say this from experience, having seen both of these failure cases numerous times in the wild.

If users are frequently reporting that the application's getting stuck at a particular percent, then - to me at least - that's valuable information for whether I should consider doing some optimization to speed up whatever step in the process corresponds with that progress percentage, or to break down that step further into smaller steps to keep things moving, or both.