Having worked fleetingly with ddcutil I fully agree that it is far from easy maintaining a consistent UX when having to deal with an inconsistent variable (which quite surprisingly lives inside my screen and not in some server at the other side of the world) . In this sense I would opt for providing more rather than less information to the user given that the laggy nature of the underlying interface can not be well hidden.
I would also like to mention this thread, discussing the inconsistency of the UI of the Brightness Controls.
I really hope ddcutil 2.2 brings on some amazing improvements and solves much of your problems, but in case it doesn’t I just want to say how much I appreciate the work you’re putting in to improve on the little things.
PS:
Anyway, these kind of assumptions are what eat up a good amount of development time, as opposed to just adding new functionality. Hopefully users will find the new brightness controls worthwhile.
This is what makes for great user experience and great UX is what it is all about. There are few features that are really critical to UX but polish will always be appreciated, even if it takes some time to notice.