It would be nice to have a keyboard library available.
The way you describe it is what I thought of too, it makes sense.
I'd help with it if you needed.
Although slight modification you can use 8 directions for the 8 banks and have a key for the 'special' chars. Save counter-intuitive to press a...
I don't understand why you guys are getting so riled up about boot times from a beta OS, sure it will be improved and as someone has said already it's probably in dev mode. All the speculation is a waste just wait for it to arrive.