Fedora 8 Boot Process

[Brian Tate <btatehome gmail com>]

I was reading the feature list for Fedora 8 and was disappointed when I 
came across the "Better Startup Experience".
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

After reading the "Plan for improvement" section, I find it 
discomforting such a major change will be done to the existing very 
working/stable rhgb boot process.

1) Do away with the grub menu by default
   Why? That is the first question that came to mind. A large number of 
linux users dual-boot multiple OSes. It also is useful when you have 
multiple kernel versions installed; if you set the time-out to 3 seconds 
do you really notice it?
2) Switch to graphical Mode in initrd, draw an animation....
   I have an animation now in rhgb, and as a bonus I can see all my 
services loading if I hit the "more" button. I trust this feature will 
not go away?
3) rhgb goes away
   ?reinvent the wheel?

This sounds a lot like the useless Mac OS X boot sequence in which a 
little circle is animated in the middle of the screen. That tells the 
user nothing what is going on in the boot process and is a pile of crap. 
Almost as brilliant as the Windows Vista loading screen.

I'd be curious to hear others thoughts on this; I can't be the only user 
out there who likes to know his system is indeed booting up and what it 
is doing. Is this really the direction we want for the fedora-desktop 
environment? Simply cloning other OSes poor user interface decisions?