How many situations in this game are there where you [u]can't[/u] withdraw, regroup safely, open your menus, wait for the server to figure out what's in your inventory, select the appropriate weapon, pop ammo synthesis, and then wait for the server to get around to rendering the weapon for you so that you can ADS with it? Any solo player or team on mics can employ this tactic with a trivial amount of effort. Unless there's some very tight lock-in zone battles in the VoG, the answer to "how many" is hovering right around "zero". The argument that "you shouldn't be able to switch because the game is designed that way" is rather weak . It's not designed that way. All you have to do is find a rock/corner/wall to hide behind, pop a bubble, stealth, whatever, and leave aggro range or line of sight; then you have all the time in the world to switch weapons. So why hotkey weapons? All that time wasted while the inventory interface figures out which icons to show us can be completely avoided with hotkeys, and right now it slows down the flow of combat without providing any benefit. It's not any more efficient or skilled to plan who will shoot at what than it is to bring all the guns and plan where you will switch them out. There's already a built in penalty for selecting a new weapon; That penalty is waiting for the weapon to be rendered after the switch, and watching your ammo evaporate. All by itself, that can take between 10 seconds and a minute depending on the circumstances, and it's obviously a limitation of the server-side inventory/network methods that Bungie is using, not a deliberate game mechanic intended to make us adapt. This is the real reason people want a hotkey...because this part of the user interface flat out [u]sucks[/u]. It was badly planned and poorly executed, and it's probably too late to fix it without a major system overhaul because network traffic for inventory queries is always going to be just about the lowest priority data moving through the network in this game, and putting inventory storage on the client-side is just begging for hax. If you prioritize it higher than any of the combat-related traffic, you're setting the network up for people to use the inventory screen to snaffle hit detection or maneuvering. The opportunity cost for those of us who bring all the appropriate guns to a gun fight is that we can carry less loot out the door at the end. If you enjoy the way you play, kudos to you, however, other people find other solutions, and none of us has a monopoly on doing it right.