Good point there. If we decide not to give “special treatment” to the pattern matrix, this could be viewed as inconsistent. IMO the pattern matrix should be working with the exact same focus mechanics as the rest of the interface. This way, we won’t be left with a mess, once the Renoise interface becomes more modular. But this is of course what this whole discussion is about?
My personal wish would be that the matrix adopted more shortcuts than what we’ve already got. So, for example you could select some matrix slots and hit the “transpose” shortcut, just like you would in the pattern editor. The pattern editor has a bunch of shortcuts : block/column/track/pattern “operations” - so I’m basically proposing that the matrix blocks get it’s own category where we add all the relevant operations like humanize, quantize, transpose etc., which would then work on the selected blocks