The honest answer was that I really didn't know what buttons I was pushing. It does not take long to learn either - a few hours to be usable, a few days to be pretty good, and a few weeks to almost be a part of it. In general, the people who use computers tend to use it on a regular basis. You want to have as efficient a translation from the first glimmer of an idea to action as you can. Extra strings, characters, arm movements don't help.
People are much better at adapting to computers than computers are at adapting to people.
Since the idea is to get the job done, you don't want any extra bottlenecks. This is not to say that we should not try to make the computer easier to use, just that we should realize when the efficiency of the interface is being drastically reduced at the expense of making it more recognizable to someone totally unfamiliar with the system. The idea of a menu command interface that can be used or not used or called up when you want it was an excellent example of this. The beginner used the menu, the veteran used the command interpreter directly. My RAND editor had a simple keyboard map that could be called up with one finger wiggle, and put back just as easily.