On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 9:59 PM kendell clark <coffeekingms@gmail.com> wrote:
But how do I get to applications that formally resided
in the message tray without resorting to the mouse? Could a keyboard
shortcut be added in 3.16 that would jump to that area?

It has already been added to the ctrl-alt-tab popup, so it is possible to navigate to the area using the keyboard. Unfortunately the icons themselves are notoriously bad with regard to accessibility though ...