[jrochkind1]

To me there's a big difference between intentionally slowing down the underlying operation (or the ability of the UI to go to the next step anyway) so you can show a longer progress bar, and just having a poorly designed uninformative progress bar on the underlying operation.

Not to you, really? I mean, I guess we can't argue about "how outraged you are", that's up to you.

Do you think those poorly designed progress bars are built to intentionally mislead? It's possible. For what end, do you think? The TurboTax one seems designed to intentionally mislead. Even if they both are, I still prefer one that isn't making me wait artificially longer than the software actually requires though.