I personally think it greatly enhances the feel of a movie and nothing distracts from the awesome action.
Mr357 already knows how I feel about that.
It is possible to remove the icons and the sound effects. I've done it for a mod video. The rest of the HUD can be removed too. It's actually not that difficult to do at all but it DOES make the recording process a lot more complicated. As far as the mod goes now Ryo's footsteps and some other sound effects will be missing too.
And because of that it would be necessary to switch the disc image every time a QTE comes up. Now this is a lot easier to do in Shenmue II thanks to its save system but it's still a lot of extra work.
And Mr357 is already putting a ton of effort into recording this huge game.
All in all I respect the approach of keeping the QTEs intact. It's more pleasant than that old Shenmue II movie where they removed the QTE icons and sounds by cutting them to shreds.
