Why does MIDI metronome offer more feature/functionality than audio?

I have observed the behavior I'm about to describe under Sonar X1 Producer:
 
Due to having some control surface issues with Sonar I could not resolve, I uninstalled Sonar followed by reinstalling it. I thought the issue may have been due to a hotfix I had installed, and my control surface issues were resolved after doing this. 
 
I have a record count-in under the metronome options set for all my projects. With my previous installation, I would see a visual count down indicator in addition to hearing the metronome.  It looked like this:
 

 
After I completed my reinstallation, for the life of me I could not figure out how to get this record count-in to display again. There is not an obvious option anywhere that turns this on or off. I have discovered, for reasons unknown to me, that this will only show if you have the metronome set to use MIDI.
 
Why would this not work for an audio metronome? Is there a valid reason for this difference, or was this simply an oversight by the dev team?  I did attempt to make a feature request with this question too, but the website appears to be broken when submitting them.
 
 

Sonar Producer X1b build 242 x64.
 
I have just reproduced the issue by changing the metronome to audio.  The record-in count down does not display nor does pressing the escape key to cancel function.  The display simply looks like this:
 

 
With the metronome set to MIDI, the escape key does allow canceling and it appears as follows:
 

 
There were no other changes to my project other than changing the metronome from MIDI to audio. My track is still armed, but there is a definite behavior change between the two.
 

well.  I was 100% certain I had seen that yesterday when I was recording some vox.  but after you questioned it, I went and verified just now again and I can't get it to show up unless it's only on MIDI settings for metronome. 

I admit, however, that when I first started recording yesterday that it was on MIDI instead of AUDIO and it confused me why it had changed since I always keep it on AUDIO.  so maybe I saw it before I changed it back to AUDIO?

but at this point right now I can confirm that it does display only during MIDI metronome.  the ESC button DOES, however stop both the metronome AND the recording if pressed during that count in.  it does not affect anything after the recording actually starts.

Thank you for confirming what my original post stated above.
 
Back to my question-- is there any valid reason for this difference in behavior between MIDI and audio metronome settings? Is this record count-in display impossible to show when the metronome is set to audio? (I cannot imagine why it cannot be done).
 
It seems like a bug. Can this be fixed?
 
Again, the feature request website appears to be broken.
TIA.

oh - I see what you mean.  I tried to submit a problem report and when I clicked SUBMIT then it gave me an error.