Thanks for the response, @QFMathew 
Comes back to the user context, I suppose - I’m one of the glut of incoming sole traders who probably have significantly simpler needs; I’ve bought a load of random bits and pieces from Amazon etc over the last three months, and just need to get the details into QF as smoothly as possible so I can bang out a VAT return. And as a sole trader, every minute you add to this process is a minute less I get to spend with my family… and boy does it add up when you’ve got 40 receipts to enter. Dinner’ll be cold tonight.
I can see how the existing approach may have been fine for other types of business: but larger businesses just don’t feel the friction as intensely as smaller ones. Streamlining the UI, removing every unnecessary mouse-click, benefits all though.
On keyboard integration: the thing I really found hard was the lack of navigation within a screen, rather than just needing to get to different sections of QF as a whole.
If you walk through the receipt tagging process and count the number of times you have to take your hand off the keyboard and use the mouse, it’s way more often than it ought to be. Once you’re actually typing in the fields, you can Tab between most of them, but not all - once you get down to Project Tags, Tab stops working. You can’t tab to the Paid in full bit (which for me is always going to be the case), nor the “Create” button without mousing over to them.
For bigger businesses where every purchase has been through a PO process, it may make sense to confirm the amount was typed correctly, I suppose, but for smaller businesses it’s a lot of extra friction on every single receipt entry.
And once you’ve entered the Receipt Total, if QF wasn’t able to find a matching invoice (which it never will with me - I’m an animator, so every single purchase is ad-hoc, a cable, a drive, printer paper; and every single one was Paid in Full already) so there’s no need to tell me, and then make me mouse over to click on a button to make a new purchase …
… and then when you put the rest of the fields on screen, I have to mouse up and click on the first one before I can start typing again.
At least if you set the focus to the Create New Purchase button when it appears, I could just hit Enter.
90% of my use of QF is going to be this receipt tagging screen. It’s what my accounts consist of. So I think the frustration just comes from knowing that my future is going to involve an awful lot of work / mousing / clicking that could be removed with a more streamlined UI.
And it doesn’t need to be at the cost of making things harder for bigger businesses; while it’d be great to have a user preference for “never bother searching, just put the whole tagging form up for each receipt”, at the very least make it possible to tab to every field (including buttons), and any time you put a form on screen (or put new fields up), set the keyboard focus appropriately. That’d make things better for all sized users.