OOo Impress seems to copy PowerPoint, which is a shame since PowerPoint was a 10 
year leap backward in presentation software as Microsoft made it with most of 
the same (and even worse) limitations as normal printed overhead projector 
transparencies.

So, what are the biggest problems with normal printed transparencies? Let's 
consider a small presentation with a bulleted list with 6 items, and let's say 
there is room for 4 items per page. The presenter makes the items visible one by 
one.

Problem 1: The items are visible different amounts of time. People in the 
audience make notes, copying text from the shown presentation. There will be a 
lot of time to copy text from the first item on the list, a little less time for 
the second one, even less for the third one and very little time for the forth 
one. After that the next page is shown (the page containing the 5th and 6th 
items).

Problem 2: The room might have a low ceiling (unless it's an auditorium), and 
there might be people sitting in front of you. Each item on the list is shown 
lower, and most likely will people need to move their heads back and forth to 
read the last item on a page.

Now combine these two: The harder an item is to read the shorter time it will be 
visible. If this isn't stupid I don't know what is.

So, the obvious solution is, of course, the following. Use a 
transition/animation that displays each new item at the top of the page, 
scrolling the already visible items down. Also, show all 6 items of this 
presentation like this, without clearing the screen inbetween.
So, when displaying this presentation it should look like a single long page 
containing the items in the reverse order and that is scrolling up (i.e. the 
items are scrolling down). When the presentation is printed out it would of 
course have the items in the correct order and could span several pages (in this 
case it would span 2 pages).

The title/heading/topic should probably stay at the top of the page while the 
list items are scrolling. After the last item is displayed then the 
title/heading/topic should scroll down with its items when the next 
title/heading/topic is displayed, which in turn will remain at the top of the 
page while displaying its list items.

I find this solution incredibly obvious, yet immensely better than the currently 
supported system. There are probably many other, less obvious, but equally 
useful effects that WORK -- as opposed to many of the current 
swirl/twist/fly/dematerialize kind of effects used by clueless marketing monkeys 
even though they only distract the viewers, drawing their attention away from 
the actual content of the presentation.