Did you know you can expand the Tag AW to take up the whole left hand pane as well (cover up the tree)?
I do, although I found out about that rather late; and by accident
Select a field in the file list and hit F2. You can then Tab to move to the next column or Shift-Tab to go to the previous column. The up and down arrows can move you between rows.
I got it, when AlexB mentioned it.
Look, sometimes the expendable Tag pane is the best solution. But other times list view works best (say I'm collecting music clips - not only music videos - and their naming it's always a mess, so there's still more manual work then I'd like to admit, for filenaming structure to fields). So I bulk rename, Fill prop. from filename, Pane tag them to death. If there's still a few particular inconsistencies it's faster to fix them by hand then to invent a suber-uber-complicated technique that can only be used 3 times. So I move around and type and the expectation is that everything will behave like the rest of the world when navigating/typing something. Learning Tab - Shift-Tab - Up - Down, instead of the normal 4 arrow keys looks backwards to me, and there should be a pretty good reason for it which right now I'm not seeing. Also doing this while pretty much being in edit mode for every field from here to there... I don't get it. If I navigate and I overshoot (the only mistake possible when just navigating) I get back fast, fingers still on the 4 arrow keys. If I navigate while in editing mode (F2->Tab or Shift-Tab) crazy things can happen since every field from here, all the way to there, can be edited by mistake.
It's not an end of the world problem but I find it curious that while in TheaterView the navigation is hell-bent on using only the 4 arrow keys (with implications bigger than one might think), in standard view Edit modes and Shift-Tab combinations are required.