The "seek" button, along with "step tuning" was the worst "improvement" radio ever received.
Instead of "listening" while tuning, we now let a "voltage discriminator" decide whether we want to hear a station.
And as you describe, It IS stupid.
Tuning manually since these "advancements" is slow and deliberate, and hampers listeners from "looking around".
Compare an AM bandscan top-to-bottom with an analog tuner (listening for interest) to the same with a digital tuner.
I bet such a scan takes 3 or 4 times longer with the step-wait-listen process.
And why does there need to be ANY delay before audio? The step-wait-listen cycle is much shorter for FM on most radios,
on the AM it is maddening. I remember one or two car radios (aftermarket)with digital readouts which tuned continuously
and displayed AM tuning by 1khz steps. Ahhh, if only that had become the standard!
Far better was the old "magic tuning" 1960's car radios with analog pointers, and a "country" or "city" seek button.
A real bear to fix, but the sensitivity!
Of course, these were mono FM, but many stations at that time were only horizontally polarized, so vertical FM masts were at a disadvantage.
