I used to have cable TV without box (direct stuff via analog cable) until mid-2000s, and man, 15-ish years forward, the order of magnitude slower channel zapping still bothers me as hell.

(To be fair though, nowadays we have UHD/4K channels, which need way more bandwidth than the SD TV quality from 2000s. I wonder if this could be fixed with a more powerful CPU in those boxes? maybe it could, but might increase power usage?).