I was confused by the units too. I like to mentally estimate how long it's going to take me to reach a certain altitude, for example, and the units displayed on the console didn't make sense to me. :)
I think your problem is that some people want to view it as a casual fun video game, and some people want to view it as a LEM simulator. The first group find it too hard and the second group find it too easy.
In case it helps: I would expect the rate display to be in units/second or units/minute, in order to estimate an amount of time in a useful way.
