The shortcuts are what converted me to a happy user. Programming question? "my search !so". Map? "address !m". Will True Knowledge have a good answer? "How old is Obama? !tk". For Wolfram Alpha: "How old is Obama !wa". Is Google really the best place for the answer? "who won the australian open !g". Even if 90% of your searches are google, ddg is a great way to access it!
The thing is that, for example, for programming questions google finds it on SO without any shortcuts needed. If I type address in Google it will give me a link to the map anyway. I know it takes a second to type !whatever, but you need to remember that. And if you need to stop and think "was it !so or !s or !stack or whatever it was?" you lose your concentration and next thing you know you've spent half hour browsing unrelated articles on Wikipedia. Exaggerating a bit but the point is these !things are a speedbump.
I disagree. Most of them are extremely intuitive. Heck, I've once found out about new bangs I didn't know by typing in the name/abbreviation of the site as a bang on a whim, and it worked!
Also, if you think the bangs are unintuitive, what's your opinion on keyboard shortcuts? It's basically the same thing.
