Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...

I completely agree. This issue was pointed out to the developers well before the release (in 2009, immediately after the shell development started) and regularly brushed aside.

In the end the developers began to shut down everyone who tried to raise the matter because it was a design decision already discussed multiple times without considering that if a lot of people are so annoyed by your design that they decide to subscribe to a mailing list to complain, maybe you should question the design, not the users.

It seems simple enough to me: there's something wrong with a desktop environment that can't be used efficiently without a cheat sheet, so I'll stay with GNOME 2 as long as possible and then I'll move to XFCE.