That's funny. I use them in the exact opposite way.
When I want exact positioning then I will use the scrollbar. When I want to scroll past pages and pages, I will just fling the scrollwheel.
Scroll bars, on the other hand are perfect for that kind of jump — where you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you know mostly where it is, and you’ll recognize it when you see it.
† There was a time, right when momentum scrolling was first introduced as a third-party mouse-driver feature ca. Windows 98, where it wasn’t capped. But that was a horrible UX: if something was really far down the document, then by the time you saw the thing you wanted to stop at, you would often be going far too fast and overshoot it by a lot, requiring almost as much scrolling back in the other direction. This first iteration of the feature basically expected people to understand how to “land” on a target using inertial, frictionless thrust. I imagine there were some future Kerbal Space Program players who enjoyed that, but most people didn’t.
Some of their newer gaming mice have a half-ass version of this as well with a manual mechanical toggle.
For exact scrolling I'll use the scroll wheel or dive for the scrollbar.
What I really want is a toggle bound to a button for enabling/disabling drag scrolling. Most of my flow is keyboard based so being able to toggle that on/off for a dedicated stroller would be great.
Its battery lasts about a few weeks with above-average use (12+ hours per day, 7 days per week)
Your vision probably is correct in most of the cases as people just misuse this, yet this makes another kind of sense also: the more elements you see the harder tha is to digest for your brain (attention). Screen space has became more abundant but human attention capacity has not (perhaps it even decreased).
1. Back when scroll bars were fixed width and consistent across all applications, I would instinctively tune them out when I wasn't using them; I don't need the application to do that for me.
2. More importantly, many websites are adding some kind of progress indicator on the page itself (perhaps because the scroll bars are no longer obvious enough?). These are way more in-your-face than the scroll bars of yore.
If there were fewer elements _total_, okay I'd agree with you. But all the elements are there, just some of them are hidden, so they take _more_ time to remember how to reveal each one.
When they're all visible, you can use simple 2-D memory, and "reach for" the area that a given control is in, even before you've found it, because you know it's in that general area. Get the mouse moving there, find it, zero in on it.
When some of them are hidden, you have to remember which hiding place they're in (object permanence), then wiggle the mouse over in that area, wait for them to reveal themselves, then find the one you want, and start another motion to hit it.
Try me.
PgUp and PgDn are still my preferred mechanism for vertical panning. Once upon a time they even reliably moved you up or down a whole "screen" of content.
I modified my pedal so it just takes a very slight twitch of my toe to use it.
But please. just stop making everything flat ffs. On the GUIs of old, you knew straight away what you could interact with, while now, everything is so flat or hidden away that everything blends together, I have no idea what I can click on and what's static unless I used the app before.
Best example, compare Windows 95/2000/XP to 8/10.
Also, please stop with the auto-hiding bs. Sometimes I have to do a brute force sweep of the GUI with the cursor to trigger some elements to pop up from where they were hiding. WTF?! This would have made more sense 20-30 years ago when displays were running at 640x480 so real estate was precious, but now FullHD is the entry level norm.