Knowing how much time is left at a given moment of a new job is an intractable problem. Caching on controllers makes it untenable on most of my lasers, with the galvos being just as useless as the Ruida-controller CO2. Even on my gcode-driven diodes, however, time-progress is hard. A complex job with lots of fine detail (like trail maps) throws all the estimates off.
I’d love to have the current elapsed time in the Live Framing window on galvos. If you don’t have the laser control window showing when you start a job, you’re in a pickle due to the Galvo Live Framing bug(s).
Having a log (window?) of recent job elapsed times would be very helpful for at least having reference times for jobs you’re going to run more than once. Lightburn currently shows the completed job elapsed time at the bottom of the main window, but if you don’t catch it before doing anything that updates that status field, you have no way of getting it back. Having it at least persist in a “status log” window until you close LightBurn would preclude that frustration.
As for persistence of timing data, I personally throw the job time(s) into the “Show Notes” option and set it to show on file open. I also put the setup details, like what screw hole coordinates to mount a fixture to or what lens to use, but the time for each job (e.g. Front: 3:43, Back: 0:57) is really nice to keep for those annual big award engraving jobs, for example.