Sorry for the long delay in reviewing. I gave this a shot with a huge batch of 400 updates on Neon. It was a huge improvement in user experience. It's hard to express how much better Discover felt during the process. Somehow I felt more in control (a completely illusory feeling, of course) and more aware of what Discover was doing (not at all illusory). Even without animations, it's still fantastic. Strong +1.

I think if we can also get https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396140, users are going to suddenly love using Discover to perform their updates!