I agree completely.

Another pet peeve is when a "percent done" message like this rounds to the nearest percent. So once it is more than 99.5% done, it says "100% done". But obviously it's not 100% done, it's still sitting there waiting to finish!

Folks, if you are ever tasked with coding an "nn% done" message, please floor the percentage instead of rounding it.

Agree. Though at some point I also added a round up when percentage was strictly between 0% and 1%. In my case it seemed like users believed more easily that the program was “broken” if it took a while at 0% rather than 1%.

The amount of these bars that get to 99% and that in practice is the half way point is infuriating.

Surely at this point we understand the difference as programmers between the amount of bytes we need to change verses the number of files and the enormous performance difference of updating small files and why any measure needs to blend both to be at least a bit more accurate. Or if its more different types of work a much better split of the bar is necessary.

To be honest there was a short period where it felt fresh and cool when UI started to talk casually instead of the cold factual language.

Now the novelty has wore off and we should go back to those boring computer messages.