OK, so, to avoid million quote-requote, I'll summarize:

- I see kinetic scroll as a specific mouse gesture
- There is no such thing as useless animation. Unfortunately, users I had feedback from seemed to want/like it to whizz woosh and wazoom, even if you just picked an option or pressed a button. Canola is a good example, but fremantle in general also employs large amounts of animation 'for the fun of it'.
- I played with 'blind' kinetic scrolls in pyqtoreader. It's not that hard. It's pretty much equivalent to pressing a couple of keys in advance (like with cursors or pgup/pgdn while the screen has not refreshed yet). The biggest impediment there is that it's simply not cool. It works (especially as a page flip button replacement), but it's too raw.
- maemo 4.x default scrollbars are microscopic and hard to use, agreed, thus making almost ANY scroll solution appear less strenuous
- I might be 'misnaming' drag zoom. A tap or mouse gesture shows the page fit to the screen (with the current viewpoer marked), and dragging the zoomed box positions (scrolls) to the specified point on release.
- hm, two of two with pyqtoreader install problems, I'll check the package, there is a new version in the works anyway. If I had a camera at hand I'd record a video It would demonstrate much more clearly what I'm saying.