Sounds familiar. I recall instances where the small vertical bar-within-a-bar you mention becomes vanishingly small, and the overall page size unmanageable, making "scrolling" a joke.

It would be nice to know if we're making progress on problems like this. Paging and scrolling both evolved to solve problems. Perhaps they're imperfect, or could stand improvement. Perhaps not. Regardless, an open-minded discussion would probably shed some light on current thinking.