This is all very confusing. You are all mixing up a lot of different concepts from English in order to explain this. I am pretty clear on the concepts of English grammar, even if it is not my native language, while still a bit shaky on the Russian ones, so the following may include errors. But I hope to show at least that it is of little use to try and find relations between the concepts of English and Russian grammar, and it is better to try and come to terms with the foreign grammar and its ideas and implications directly.

First off, perfective and imperfective are aspects of verbs. In English, simple and progressive are similar, but not identical aspects. They are not tenses.

English has past perfect, past, present perfect, present, future and future perfect tenses. Each of these has simple and progressive aspects. The simple form of a verb is not marked in a special way (eg. go, went, gone), the progressive form uses a conjugated form of "to be" plus the present participle (am going, was going, have been going, will have been going etc.).

Russian has past, present and future tenses. Verbs with an imperfective aspect form all three tenses. Verbs with a perfective aspect only form past and future tenses. That's a very important difference. Many pairs of perfective and imperfective verbs seem to be derived from one another, but not in a regular fashion as in English. For example, most of the verbs of motion such as идти have perfective partners with по-, for example пойдти, but купить (buy) is perfective and покупать is imperfective. And there are a lot more prefixes, and prefixed imperfective verbs dervied from prefixed perfective verbs, and unrelated pairs like говорить / сказать and so on. You can see common tendencies in certain transformations but that's all.

Frequently an English progressive form from any tense corresponds with a Russian imperfective form because neither focuses on the action as being complete but rather as going on. Likewise, an English simple form may correspond with a Russian perfective form when it focuses on an action as completed. But the English simple form can refer to the present tense, whereas the Russian perfective verb cannot, and it has other uses as well, some of which are covered by imperfective verbs in Russian. Furthermore, an English verb only has one infinitive, one imperative, one present participle and one past participle, whereas both perfective and imperfective verbs in Russian have infinitives and imperatives with different uses, and imperfective verbs tend to form active and passive present participles and imperfective verbs tend to form active and passive past participles.

Examples:

Меня зовут Робин. The verb is звать, "to call", it is imperfective. This is not a single action but a general one. "They are generally calling me Robin" so to speak. But in English it is "my name is Robin" or "they call me Robin" or "I am called Robin", all of which use the simple aspect of the respective verbs (be / call). English uses simple verbs for general, repeated actions.

Он позвал меня поужинать. In this sentence the perfective word for "to call" is used, позвать. This is a single completed action, "he called me to dine". "To dine", in Russian поужинать, is also a perfective verb, here infinitive, referring to a single completed instance of dining. English uses the simple form "called" to indicate that the action is complete.

The English verb "to call" also has the meaning of "to use a phone", in Russian "звонить / позвонить". Он позвонил means "he called", a single completed action. Он часто звонил" is a series of actions, часто is a watchword which implies that you are supposed to use an imperfective verb. In English, however, you can say "he often called" which implies that he does so no longer, or "he has been calling often", which implies that he is still doing so, or even "he has called often" which implies a series of completed calls still going on. Tense adds complexity here, but one should not confuse the English perfect tense with the Russian perfective aspect.

The English perfect tense implies that something started in the past and is still going on when it uses progressive aspect. "I have been learning Russian for three years". In Russian I can simply use present tense, which restricts me to imperfective verbs: Я учу русский язык уже три года. I cannot use a perfective verb at all because I haven't finished learning yet. In English I can't use present tense to say the same thing: I can say "I am learning Russian" but can't give a time frame, and I can say "I learn Russian" as a kind of general statement as in "whenever I find a minute I learn some Russian".

The perfect tense with simple aspect implies something which took place in the past and has a result or implication in the present. "I have seen the movie" - I watched the movie in the past (completed activity) and can talk about it in the present (present implication). In Russian I can say "я посмотрел фильм", which uses the perfective verb "посмотреть", but it really just means "I watched the movie" and like this phrase does not necessarily, grammatically, imply anything about the present, which the English perfect tense does.

I am sure one could write a complete book just on the aspects of English and Russian. Or two books. But I hope I could show that there is no simple "this is like the other" explanation, even if I might have caused more confusion.