I don't like ribbon boards much either. However, the one thing I liked about ours after they were installed last year is that they were able to display things like game stats throughout the game and also give score updates.
It was almost like having a ticker in the stadium, and I liked that. You didn't have to wait until timeouts to hear score updates. We usually only get one, maybe 2 score updates a game from the press box. The ribbon boards would basically shuffle Top 25/SEC scores, and we were able to see the main stats of the game for a lot of the game.