…of course, “standards” like shapes, shape colors and the like should be defaulted to control-1…0, shift-control-1…0, and so on.
I think I forgot to mention that styles have a dedicated shortcut system already. Right-click on them in the Inspector to assign one. You can change the modifier key combination in settings, though do note that Ctrl-# all by itself would conflict with some of the zoom commands.
Your “Alt,n,g,l” example is possible; your commata indicate your need to “stop” in-between, just a little bit, we can’t type the “g” and “l” in the speed we’d use for regular wording input…
I would imagine that might have something to do with your system performance or settings. Do you have a lot fancy features turned on for your menus, animations, transparency or other such frills? For me menus come up instantaneously and I do not think I could type in the letters any faster. I don’t even see the menu, just a brief flicker of half-drawn pixels.
As for curved lines, you’ll find this has been discussed at length already.
Regarding the off-topic stuff:
I have not noticed that Mac software tends toward fewer shortcuts, but most of the software I have experience with would be somewhat classified as “geeky”, if not outright so, and in my experience Mac geeks are pretty much like geeks anywhere else. The sort of software aimed at them has similar affordances as elsewhere.
There is a common misunderstanding about the historic mouse, as it wasn’t effectively a single input tool. Sure there was one input with the button, but the event itself could be modified by the keyboard. I.e. the buttons were really always over on the left hand. It sounds awkward, but you get used to it really quick, and there are pretty good ergonomic arguments for using the hand to press a button vs delegating each finger to different buttons, given the more outstretched posture of the arm when using a mouse.
That said, that is a largely historic observation. Their mouse looks simple, but it can be set up to have all three “buttons” in that it detects pressure across the surface, meaning the finger you press hardest with changes whether you get a middle or right click. The entire back surface of the mouse is a gesture recognition surface as well, upon which you can program hundreds of functions. It’s quite unlike your standard mouse in many regards. The same goes for their trackpads, which have no equal that I have ever encountered. When you have a device that can trigger hundreds of unique events in every program right under your hand, you tend to load balance between shortcuts and that.
And about the shortcuts, Macs have an additional modifier key, and fewer reserved combinations than Windows has, meaning overall a far larger available pool per application—and with a system-wide customisation system it doesn’t really matter how many shortcuts a program ships with as you are in control of them all.
Overall there is a lot of misconception about high performance Mac usage. And evidently also misconceptions about graphic designers. Professional designers use countless shortcuts constantly, and demand sophisticated and efficient input on both hands at all times. Design software is often some of the most operationally complex out there, with documentation that fills bookshelves. This notion that graphic designers lead to the Mac having software with simplistic input schemes is bemusing.