I guess MC is a sort of Shareware, now I think about it, in that it has a free trial period. But I always think of Shareware having an option to pay for it, and that it will keep working in some limited way after a time, or have some other restriction. MC just stops working after the trial period so I consider it a commercial application with a trial period. But, that is just semantics I guess.
I initially wondered why there wasn't a simple Hotkey/Shortcut Key configuration in MC, but when you look at what can be done using the Resource.xml file, you will see that it isn't that simple. Any
Media Center Core Command can be used with a keyboard sequence, which goes well beyond simple shortcut key definition.
Make good use of the trial. There is a bit of a learning curve with MC, so it takes a while to understand how it works and get the best out of it.