Yes.
Other factors include time of day, weekend or not -- the longer a thread is "recent" the more views and therefore votes it will get -- and probably several more I can't even think of.
It's definitely not a scientific tool, but the law of averages makes it somewhat useful as a progress bar, I think. For example, the depth-of-post factor should apply to all Monks roughly equally, if we assume that all Monks behave the same in terms of how deep into a thread they would be likely to post.
The way forward always starts with a minimal test.