Yeah, same thing here--I know if you zoom in you get more control but who wants to zoom in everytime you want to do some delicate scrubbing. If this is inherent in the release then I would have to say that it was either implemented improperly or there is a bug---By the way, sometimes, it will start moving back and forth with little mouse movement on my part.
Give it some more critical tries. Be a little patient and look closely to see if it's really "erratic," or if in fact there's a reason it sometimes won't go. For instance -- you cannot scrub a blank section of the timeline. There's a significant difference between ctrl and non-ctrl scrubbing -- ctrl scrubbing has no "weighted" movement, non-ctrl scrubs with the tool at the top of the scrub line scrub with a uniform lag (this is a good thing). Check your mouse for possible problems -- I'm on a wireless and also have a wired USB and they're both providing smoooth, stable scrubbing in either direction -- but sometimes the wireless mouse "jumps," where the wired mouse does not.
LOL---It still isn't smooth--the only thing I have to compare it with is Premiere and timeline scrubbing is one of the few things that Premiere still does better.
I'd still say it's user error -- it's silky smooth for me in either direction. I think it's just not behaving exactly the way you want it to, and you're not willing to compromise -- but it's working just the way it was intended. It has a "weighted response" that falls off when you stop moving the mouse. Or, it doesn't when you press ctrl. Or...hell, there's only what, 7 ways to scrub a cat in Vegas now and you're still not happy?
Stop lecturing me--- I repeat, the scrubber will not easily move to the left--it jumps all over the place. It will move to the left when holding down the control key.
Or perhaps it is a function of a variable in our setups. . I am merely saying that it is very dicey on my computer and others who have posted with similar complaints.