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When Steve Jobs was interviewed on his stance about forcing users to go from cellphones with lots of buttons to just a touchscreen he replied "They'll learn." I haven't the foggiest idea what research there is out there on this specific decision, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was equally arrogant and part of a larger plan to unify all their gestures so they could more easily kill the mouse entirely one day.
@TinMan I just reworked the answer so that it's hopefully more useful. That's about as much time as I think I can put in to this one. Maybe someone else can dig up a better specific research paper that I'm not finding.
@TinMan I'll be first to agree that it's not pull-to-refresh specific. If you don't find it useful, that's fine. I've been looking for something more useful for you, because I want to help. It's a difficult subject to find very specific primary sources on. I don't think there is any. The closest we'll likely get is a theory built on fragments. Meanwhile, I'd appreciate you being constructive; contributing whatever you're finding.
@GrahamHerrli Plenty of users would rather not be bothered to use a tool. Pre-filling the settings for a tool so that it doubles as a reference eases use for those users. Reference-like content is great for robotic users that will never click on anything such as search engines, screen readers, social media screen capture thumbnails, browsers' reader modes, site scrapers, RSS feeds, etc. Just the same as anyone hoping for a quick copy-paste, a quick print, or a quick answer. (also thanks for the welcome, i should have joined years ago)
