blender has a gui. it's no command line tool.
the reason why everything is hard coded in blender's gui is that it started as an inhouse tool and the users sat directly next to the coders and told them what hotkeys and gui they want. the coders fullfilled their wishes in the fastest way (hard coded) and didn't think of ever releasing blender into the wild.
this was an oversight and changing this now means refactoring hundreds of thousands lines of code which is no fun to do especially for the blender coders who only work on it in their free time. it's more fun to work on shiny new features.
3d work on a computer isn't intuitive and blender for sure isn't harder to learn than the complex beasts like maya or houdini which i learned at university.
i also prefer [hard to learn but easy to use] to [easy to learn but hard to use].
Well, that said, for me personally the fastest method is a mix of both.
i use a mix of both too but more like 80% hotkeys and 20% gui buttons. constantly having to move and aim your mouse to different gui elements on the screen most of the time is much slower than using your left hand to press some keys on the keyboard and leaving the mouse where it is needed for modeling or animating.
