This is not a driver problem, nor a case of hardware not reporting back correctly. The decibel information is not available in many sound setups. And it's never

This is not a driver problem, nor a case of hardware not reporting back correctly. The decibel information is not available in many sound setups. And it's never going to be available for these setups. Even for setups where decibel information can be gathered / estimated by the sound card, why should the volume increment be hard-coded? Shouldn't the user get to decide that? Also note that this setting was available in GNOME 2. Remove existing functionality without providing an alternate doesn't make sense to me, given that it is a potential health hazard!