I understand your frustration. So, some comments: the shortcuts thing you propose would break down as soon as a demotion or promotion happened. It would imply that being a policy had something to do with having a certain type of shortcut. It would clutter the shortcuts. I'm also confused by the G/P thing - are you saying we should have guideline sections within policies? You might want to check out WP:Nutshell, something I started when I was just getting into this, for a more legal codification.
 Note that there have been efforts before to merge or clean up or take care of policies, or long discussions on what to do with them. I have not seen one so far that has succeeded. I firmly believe that specific tactics should not be discussed. General strategy ("reduce size, wordcount, statement-count, number, etc. of policies") is fine. "We should do it like this" is less interesting, unless you're actually doing it. The best thing to do is to go find a policy (WP:Naming conventions would be a good one) and start cleaning it up. Post the diffs of the changes that have gone through on that page, and sign your name (just to keep it separate, since I use it to keep track of what I personally have done).