[WorldMaker]

To take things in a more constructive direction, that said, it is an area I've experimented with/tried to solve.

My big idea was radial progress indicators to try a different "best of both worlds" approach to progress spinners versus progress bars especially for "composite" progress indication where you have an unknown number of subtasks all running at their own speeds and can be discovered/initiated independently (such as downloading files). People are worse at estimating percentages of circles than lines, which I see as something of a benefit (because the exact progress percentage should be fuzzy).

It's still not great at giving an indication of overall speed/estimated time, but it's potentially very great at "the application hasn't crashed and is busy".

It was fun to experiment with/prototype, but I don't expect it to replace progress bars any time soon. (I think it should, but it's trade-off space where every option has drawbacks and while it fits closer to what I think is my personal "ideal", it probably won't make everyone happy either.)

Demo: http://worldmaker.net/compradprog/

Source: https://github.com/WorldMaker/compradprog/

Blog post on intentions/thought process: http://blog.worldmaker.net/2015/03/17/compradprog/