[TallGuyShort]

Personally, I'd push back on such a change unless there was a very good reason. I feel like this violates the same kind of principle as "we do not break user space EVER". My point above is that a programmer should understand better than most how important muscle memory and shortcuts are to productivity.

[TeMPOraL]

I would push back too, and I think most experienced programmers understand the needs of power users[0] - problem is, they don't push back all that often. I encourage developers to try and voice their opinion about UX more often. Who knows, maybe your PM isn't a pointy-haired boss, but will turn out to be a professional willing to listen to rational arguments? I had a privilege working with such PMs; at one place, I ended up having a lot of say about UX (and provided a counterbalance to our designer) - just because I spoke up about the issues. It turned out that my views were shared by the rest of the dev team, it's just that they never bothered to voice it.

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[0] - Almost everyone who spent most of their day job using a particular set of software tools quickly becomes a power user of these particular tools. The corollary to that is that if your software is the kind to be used at a job, it better be power user friendly, or you're going to wasting your customer's money and the life their employees.