Oh freaking heck, it's just a feel-good "Look how fast my system boots!" measure. It's not going to end world hunger or prevent financial collapse. It just reduces the amount of time I spend staring at a (mostly) black screen with a blinking cursor waiting for something to happen.
As to the 3 seconds, using kernel parameters "syslog printk.time=1", I see in dmesg:
[ 0.762322] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
[ 3.783424] No floppy controller found
It's very real. On another machine that actually has a floppy controller, it passes through that step in about 0.01 second. If I use the kernel parameter "floppy=debug", I see that it's trying to lock fd0, which it times out on in 3 seconds (sorry, I don't have the messages withe me, it's on my home computer).
I'm sure that recompiling the kernel would solve it. I was just hoping to avoid that for now, though I may get to it soon.
As to the lost hours spent trying to get rid of three seconds of boot time, you're right. Logic would indicate I should just ignore it and move on with life. But then if I were logical, I would realize that it's way easier to just use windows like everyone else in the world, instead of trying to learn how to solve this massive puzzle called Linux.