A big part of that loading bar, outside of network ops and slow drives (and remember, today you don't have floppy drive noise to know if it works or got hung),

A big part of that loading bar, outside of network ops and slow drives (and remember, today you don't have floppy drive noise to know if it works or got hung), is for things like sorting and getting file icons and other attributes right. This can take non-trivial amount of time.