Hi to the faithful few bashing this thread!
I'm new here, having got to the stage of abandoning ship with you-know-who.
As a new looker, I find the setup not the easiest to understand, probably because of prior experience. I totally agree that the flashing red 'r' is VERY misleading, and it took a fair bit of reading to find out that it actually means the opposite of what intuition indicates!
So my vote is to get rid of the idiot thing as it seems to serve no useful purpose other than to confuse new shoppers.
That's my 2p; 2d; 2c worth folks.