Initialize logging early and use it in the frontend
It's annoying to not be able to log warnings from the frontend during initialization.
Currently if we enable logging earlier on there will be lots of noise. We could add a timed_activity() method similar to that provided by the plugin class with the frontend could use to time its activity and hide messages that are emitted during the timed activity.
This would mean we can remove the ticker callbacks in pipeline initialization too. We could replace them with status bar widgets.