Apple Disk Utility annoyance

[ffutures]

Apple's disk utility is very useful, but when you're using it you really want to know how long it's going to take, especially when you're doing a secure erase which can easily take a couple of hours on a big disk. So why doesn't it give any indication of the percentage of work done or how long it's going to take apart from a progress bar that doesn't show any other information? I've just had to measure the bar with a ruler to determine that the current disk is about 4/5ths done!