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This makes so much sense and is similar to how software like TurboTax inserts unnecessary progress bars to make you think they're working hard to compute your taxes. Like your example, the user perception was that what it was doing must've been easy if it was able to perform it so quickly.

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Reminds me of the classic:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/It_Must_Be_Broken

They could have just wrote horribly inefficient software like the rest of us.

They do, and their inefficiency is rendering that highly complex progress bar. How about drawing it pixel by pixel in Java without acceleration APIs and then embedding that via JNI. I'd wager you could get 10 seconds of CPU time and 500 MB of RAM use out of every progress bar ...

Sounds like an example of real-world Speed-Up Loops[1]

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

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