Possible to disable selection via mouse on timeline?

Question

This is easily the most heinously annoying feature of Quicktime, far and away so.
Why it's too much to assume that anybody who actually wants to use QuickTime's editing functionalities wouldn't be capable of executing, if not in fact preferring, the "i" and "o" keyboard shortcuts which manually place in and out points is beyond me.
QuickTime's scrubbing frankly isn't particularly useful, and so I find myself clicking on the timeline frequently to jump around in a video. However, QuickTime is absolutely abominable when it comes to the mouse-slider interface, and impossibly unpredictable. It seems as though the indented functionality is such that any click inside the slider bar proper should simply move the playhead, whereas any click below the slider bay proper will move the nearest in/out point to the click position. However, due to some bug or perhaps simply poor design, it is very possible to cause the in/out points to move even when clicking only inside the slider bar proper. Perhaps this is due to proximity with other objects, possibly the playhead.
I find this behavior highly annoying, and even worse, once there is a selection, QuickTime starts getting ideas about dropping the selection back on to the slider bar, and all kinds of interface "features" QuickTime simply isn't capable of without a proper timeline interface.
So, my question is simple. Is there any way to modify QuickTime's configuration such that the only way to manipulate in/out points is using the keyboard shortcuts, completely disabling mouse input for this function?
Thanks in advance.
P.S. It would be nice if QuickTime had a little more interface configurability. It would be reasonable, for example, for the default behavior to be such that, in order to manipulate the in/out points via mouse, they would have to be actually dragged from A to B. If a user wants more precise control than that there's no reason he can't locate the playhead and then use the keyboard shortcuts from there. Quicktime isn't FCP, and it doesn't have a proper timeline.
IMO.

Answer 1

I don't know how to do what you describe, but you must admit that what we have now is a vast improvement over what we used to have: prior to QuickTime 7.something (I forget where it appeared) the "I" and "O" keyboard shortcuts *didn't exist* and Avid-style "JKL" scrubbing did not work as it does now.
So I completely agree with your assessment, but also recognize that we've come a long way since 6.5.3.
What you could do, though, is to write yourself an editing tool in XCode. Just build yourself an alternate controller for QuickTime Player, and perhaps set it up so that you can type in a time and jump to it, or you can lock the in and out points. That would be fairly simple to do...when you lock the in or out point your program makes note of the timecode, and if the selection start or end point changes, it just changes it back to the noted value.
I haven't tried anything like that lately, but it seems that it would be quite possible...