I love meter threads... LoL
If you want to see what's going on with the game - Go to Adobe, create an account. Download Scout - Run it. Start the game. Pull up the client window in Scout and play.
If you have two monitors its much easier to see as it's in real time, you'll see what's crapping out your game.
The meter animation is just a streaming vector animation, it relies on your setup's ability to render the stream as it's fed from whatever server you're connected to.
The meter works the way it's supposed to, it is not designed to offer up a constantly smooth and repeatable 'click' every time. It adjusts the timing randomly and that translates into missed dings, early clicks and the dreaded 'turbo meter', that one is a huge offset, almost to the end of the light blue, almost a full 1/10th of a second delay.
This is not a 'video' game, it's a Flash based browser game - That's like comparing a riding lawn mower to an Audi R8, ya they're both vehicles and will get you where you need to go, buuuut...... ya... lol
If you want to play the game nice and smoothly - buy an older T61, drop some ram in it, play it on wifi. That's what I do and my meter is fine 99% of the time. Only thing I've noticed over the last update is player shot animations are lagging a bit. Butt that doesn't affect shot making.