I like the hotbar, at least in theory; in practice it could do with some improvement, but I guess there's little point in me covering old ground. As Kalrakh says, there's too much stuff for a radial menu to be workable and my admittedly somewhat limited experience is that they're really a compromise solution for controllers rather than something that's ideal for keyboard and mouse. Also in that regard I would've thought that function keys (with modifiers for other hotbars) would've been quite an elegant solution for accessing things*, it's just a shame that F5/F9 for quicksave and quickload are pretty much set in stone everywhere.
* well okay, admittedly not for 60% keyboards, but y'know.
