[bitcrusher]

I understand that your experience is yours but I also believe that you might be going about it the wrong way.

First, you don't REALLY need to know anything but Meta-X and Control-XS, Control-XF, Control-XC to get going. Those aren't really that hard to remember or make muscle memory for, IMO. It IS hard to have to go back a bit to re-integrate how to do things in a new way if you're already happy with your existing workflow, so if there's no value for you, then... don't use it. Use whatever works for you.

[Cerium]

I would like to add control-g to the list. It is frustrating for new emacs users that it can be easy to get stuck. Control-g is the general "quit" which will get you back to editing text from most annoying situations.

[outworlder]

Mashing ESC also works.

ESC ESC ESC (translated from <escape> <escape> <escape>) runs the command keyboard-escape-quit (found in global-map), which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in ‘simple.el’.

[bitcrusher]

Yes, I definitely missed that one. Good catch.