There exists a body of empirical evidence that suggests users have a preference for progress bars that accelerate as they near completion. The same body of evidence suggests that any pauses in the progress process, but **especially** late pauses, have a profound negative impact on how users experience the process as a while.
The best paper on this subject is <http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHarrison.pdf>.
So the progress bar should ideally accelerate and never stops.
Some things we could do to achieve this are:
* Make the loading of VisualEditor correspond to the first 40% of the progress bar, giving us the remaining 60% as breathing room.
* If everything loads super-fast, then the remaining 60% are filled in instantly.
* If a part of the loading process starts taking long, we can start utilizing the 60%.
* As a last resort, slow down progress exponentially in lieu of pausing.
The 40% / 60% numbers are guesses; some experimentation will disclose the best values.