You can hold down the space bar to bring up the Hotbox. If you click and hold on the center Maya button, you get quick access to all orthographic views. It's not the Viewcube, but it prevents having to swap between viewports constantly. Maya saves any objects you copy to some file somewhere, which Maya uses as a permanent…
I have the split tool assigned to ctrl-w, I don't recall having to do anything special to get that to work, I'll post back if I can think of something. Agreed that's super annoying about the preferences; I've never understood why the save button in the prefs doesn't write to the file. (or at least give us a button for it…
@ Joopson Which is why I asked specifically for examples of other people using Maya. So I could see what stuff doesn't trigger crashes and just do that. It's my fault for posting to the wrong forum. Post in technical talk, get technical answers. That's not what the thread was supposed to be about, but since people are keen…