Does anyone really care about safety demonstrations? I don’t and generally ignore them and my perception is that most other people do too. Some are so irritating I put my finger on my ears and hum, not too loudly to disturb those around me I hope.

Has any real research been done showing the demonstration to be effective? Probably very difficult to do but I suspect not. Doing it is another matter; what fun if we all had to practice opening doors and sliding down before each flight, but only the crew will presumably have done that in their training.