@Evan and everyone else,
I think the point xpclient was making is that the fact that the ribbon *has* these two letter accelerators is tacit admission in its implementation that it is less usable than what came before. If it was an improvement then there would be no need to preserve such "backward compatability" hacks to continue to support muscle memory derived from the old, inferior UX. People's muscles would quickly adapt to the new, vastly superior UX. *IF* it was such a major usability improvement.
Ergo the fact that those accelerators are there == usability fail.
The "disaster" part I can't quite fathom, unless xpclient is putting himself in the shoes of the Usability Sub-Committee of the Ribbon Design Committee : "Guys, this new design was supposed to be more intuitive, but we've had to put these UX compatability shims in to keep it usable... it's a disaster!"
Um... what was the topic again ? LOL