You can tap&hold on screen while countdown, when you release the screen it will immediately take a picture - so by holding the screen for more than 3 seconds you can overcome this. But there's still lots of room for improvement.
You can also "press-and-hold" on the picture. And when you lift the finger the photo is taken.
Counter is pretty sweet when you get used to it, believe me :)
In like 50% of cases when tapping on ping notification I end up with either blurry image of my feed or a blurry image of something else.
Also I don't really see what kind of value that counter adds to anything.