EDIT-- Okay, I drafted this a bit last night, so I'm gonna make a small edit. If I understand correctly from Ross's most recent posts, it is *indeed*, as I originally surmised from the video, that the act of switching between the keyboard and the mouse for a control scheme is the fundamental problem? In other words, it's not that everything must be done with the mouse, it's just that using the full keyboard slows things down.
I'd say video modern game designers generally agree. Hence why my proposal was to take a page from video games and make a hybrid using only hotkeys that are within easy reach of the w-a-s-d gaming position (though I realize I kinda buried that info in the design document, so it may have looked like I was advocating any old hotkeys, full stop). After all, it's not like you ever end up using two mice at a time, so otherwise your left hand is just kinda hanging out? And I figure most people who play games should be pretty comfortable with the layout, though-- that may admittedly not include the kind of games Ross tends to play. 
In terms of maximizing the power of the mouse, and certainly if anyone was seriously entertaining driving only with the mouse-- I mean, optimally, to be honest, I actually WOULD like to use a mouse with more buttons on it. I know that was a bit of a joke in the video, but IRL my mouse is an MMO mouse with 12 re-mappable side-buttons explicitly so I can do more things with my mouse. I think the radial menu idea has merit, but I think that stacking of nodes becomes a problem (I have something like it in my own mock up and it's honestly the part of it I like least). The first thing I ever saw with a radial menu almost exactly like the one Ross mocked up was actually "The Sims", and even in that context, it could get overwhelming with a mere 12 options in practice. You could alleviate that by having the first tier of options act like "folders" with a second tier of objects below that being more "file" level options that fit inside them, and come up when you mouse over a "folder".
On some level there's almost an information-theory problem underlying trying to get too much from too little with the mouse-- you have to be able to match the level of information provided by the mouse's actions to the number of things you want to be able to specify with it (Eh-- roughly. I could complicate that but let's not). Basic stuff, but I think framing it that way kinda clarifies the challenge? You can make the target much softer by manually creating a subgroup-- EG, from the example above, CONSTRUCTING a folder that you put specific files or programs in to invoke. Put another way, it's easier to use a mouse to specify one of 12 hand-picked things, rather than find that same item among a file-system of thousands of things organized in varying ways. But the hand-crafting solution seems like it would be inherently impossible to take to scale, and probably couldn't allow full control of a system in its own right. I feel like gestures or fighting-game-esque combinations of buttons are really your best bet at approximating full control, from a purely theoretical perspective (A multi-button mouse truly COULD unite a lot of this control on the mouse. Because maximum number of unique invocable files or programs is predicted by X^N where X is the number of buttons on the mouse and N is the number of keys pressed in a combination. My mouse has a total of 16 buttons not counting the dpi and mode switches. Get 3 or 4 buttons deep and that's a serious amount of options.). That is, I can imagine those generating the most bang-for-the-buck in terms of simple solutions that can specify one item among hundreds or 1000s in relatively short time-scales.
Not to let air out of the balloon on gestures, but in practice I really dislike them. I do have a small proposed fix for them, but I'll start with my gripes. As an early adopter of gestures, and tried, I believe, both the old-school opera gestures with the pop-up guide, and some kind of gesture plugin for Firefox, and used both for quite some time (I was/am a bit of a browser enthusiast). For simple things they were alright, for more complex things I just found myself preferring to do it the old way. In part it was that there was a not-insubstantial error rate. It can be harder than it looks to programmatically identify even a simple shape once you get up to 3 strokes, and the problem worsens the more gestures there are because there are only so many ways to arrange 3 strokes-- certainly when all the lines have to be contiguous. Throw in curved strokes-- given that it's quite hard actually to draw a perfect line with the mouse-- and the problem becomes even harder. THAT SAID-- I do have one thought on making them more workable, which is you could bring up a phone-password-style-grid when you press the gesture hotkey. That would at least solve the problem of gestures being hard for the computer to interpret, and greatly expand the number of unique invocations possible depending on the number of pegs in the grid-- though you'd still need to memorize the symbols, of course.
Edit History
I guess I may have misunderstood something.
The way I've understood the conversation so far is that Ross was looking for a mouse ONLY method? I guess that wasn't what I took away from the video, though. My understanding from the video is that the meat of the complaint with the keyboard is that switching to search on the keyboard is less-than-ergonomic? Slash, the console is kinda a pain to use for some people. Which is fair enough, 'cause I don't like the console much either. Hence why my proposal was to take a page from video games and use only hotkeys that are within easy reach of the w-a-s-d gaming position. After all, it's not like you ever end up using two mice at a time, so otherwise your left hand is just kinda hanging out? And I figure most people who play games should be pretty comfortable with the layout, though-- that may admittedly not include the kind of games Ross tends to play.
If the explicit goal is to do everything through the mouse-- I mean, optimally, to be honest, I actually WOULD like to use a mouse with more buttons on it. I know that was a bit of a joke in the video, but IRL my mouse is an MMO mouse with 12 re-mappable side-buttons explicitly so I can do more things with my mouse. I think the radial menu idea has merit, but I think that stacking of nodes becomes a problem (I have something like it in my own mock up and it's honestly the part of it I like least). The first thing I ever saw a radial menu almost exactly like the one Ross mocked up in was actually "The Sims", and even in that context, it could get overwhelming with a mere 12 options in practice. You could alleviate that by having the first tier of options act like "folders" with a second tier of objects below that being more "file" level options that fit inside them, and come up when you mouse over a "folder".
On some level there's almost an information-theory problem underlying trying to get too much from too little with the mouse-- you have to be able to match the level of information provided by the mouse's actions to the number of things you want to be able to specify with it (Eh-- roughly. I could complicate that but let's not). Basic stuff, but I think framing it that way kinda clarifies the challenge? You can make the target much softer by manually creating a subgroup-- EG, from the example above, CONSTRUCTING a folder that you put specific files or programs in to invoke. Put another way, it's easier to use a mouse to specify one of 12 hand-picked things, rather than find that same item among a file-system of thousands of things organized in varying ways. But the hand-crafting solution seems like it would be inherently impossible to take to scale, and probably couldn't allow full control of a system in its own right. I feel like gestures or fighting-game-esque combinations of buttons are really your best bet at approximating full control, from a purely theoretical perspective (Hence why I want a many-button mouse, right? Because maximum number of unique invocable files or programs is predicted by X^N where X is the number of buttons on the mouse and N is the number of keys pressed in a combination). That is, I can imagine those generating the most bang-for-the-buck in terms of simple solutions that can specify one item among hundreds or 1000s in relatively short time-scales.
I lean in the direction of button combos. Well, clearly, since I basically wanted to use the keyboard as an extension of the mouse. In practice I really dislike gestures. I say that as someone who was an early adopter of them, and tried, I believe, both the old-school opera gestures with the pop-up guide, and some kind of gesture plugin for Firefox, and used both for quite some time (I was/am a bit of a browser enthusiast). For simple things they were alright, for more complex things I just found myself preferring to do it the old way. In part it was that there was a not-insubstantial error rate. It can be harder than it looks to programmatically identify even a simple shape once you get up to 3 strokes, and the problem worsens the more gestures there are because there are only so many ways to arrange 3 strokes-- certainly when all the lines have to be contiguous. Throw in curved strokes-- given that it's quite hard actually to draw a perfect line with the mouse-- and the problem becomes even harder. THAT SAID-- I do have one thought on making them more workable, which is you could bring up a phone-password-style-grid when you press the gesture hotkey. That would at least solve the problem of gestures being hard for the computer to interpret, and greatly expand the number of unique invocations possible depending on the number of pegs in the grid-- though you'd still need to memorize the symbols, of course.
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