All of those you listed have have standard shortcuts except menu, help, and maximize. Moving them to special keys would be a backwards step, because my fingers

All of those you listed have have standard shortcuts except menu, help, and maximize. Moving them to special keys would be a backwards step, because my fingers wouldn't know where they were, and they would different from keyboard to keyboard. Duplicating the functions on extra keys would be mostly harmless, but using command-letter would still be much faster. Reading more carefully, maybe you are talking specifically about full-size keyboards, because the only buttons specifically for text editing are delete (arguable), tab, shift (also a generic modifier), and caps-lock.