I've spent embarrassingly little time in the emacs UI, so my opinions on this should be taken lightly, but I feel like all of the bindings are of the form "if W, do X and Y, otherwise do Z" and, as a result, I'm actively afraid of what's going to happen when I hit a key. I would much prefer bindings with simple, highly predictable behavior. I'm sure there's some workflow for which these contextual, compound bindings are fantastic, but other workflows wind up fighting against them.

I don't have a specific proposal in mind, but Gmail's bindings seem like a good model to emulate (the actions, at least; I've never been too fond of the specific key choices).