I find it quite annoying that Bethesda chose to use certain mutually exclusive activities. Two examples thus far:

1) To enter Power Armor, hit E. To exit PA, hold the E to exit the PA. This conflicts with grabbing things, which require that after placing the cursor over the object to be grabbed, you must press and hold E for a second or so. The trouble is, the player doesn't know all of the objects that are grabbable. Or whether an item is grabbable, but he just didn't have the cursor over the correct pixel to execute the maneuver. So while wearing PA, I go to grab something and the next thing I know, I'm exiting the PA. In and out, in and out, all because both functions use the press-E-and-hold mechanic.

2) Tossing grenades requires hitting the Alt key. However, while using a sniper scope zoomed in, the player uses the Alt key to hold his breath (thereby steadying his aim). For one thing, it means that the player can't be zoomed in and while doing that casually lobbing a grenade in that direction. But more frequently it means that during a fire fight where the player tries to steady his aim at the same time as zooming in, there goes a grenade. (Quite annoying when trying to be stealthy with a suppressed sniper rifle. "What was that??" becomes "We're under attack!")

I checked the Controls option and there's no ability to assign different hotkeys to these several functions. That forces me to endure getting the wrong results when choosing those actions should be simple and distinct.

Consolification.

Well, I'm more annoyed with the fact that bash and lobbing grenades share the same key. On multiple occasions have I dropped a grenade right at my feet

Anyways, regarding rebinding the key, I found that binding bash/grenade to mouse4 (if your mouse have more than 3 buttons) will default hold breath to left ALT, and thus seperating the keys. Dunno why it does that, but it does. Similar, I have the pip-boy / searchlight on mouse5, which keeps TAB as an exit key only.

Yeah, the controls for pc are anything but intuitive. Simply put, they [censored] svck. Unfortunately, it is extremely doubtful Bethesda will ever do anything to fix this. Likely, we'll have to rely on the modders (yet again) to fix something that Beth could've done themselves had they spent any time whatsoever testing the pc version for problems like these.

Wait, your grenade and your brethe-hold button are the same... on PC? Are you sure?

I swapped my keybinds around a lot, but I have grenade on F, so it is press F for quick-melee/power, and hold for grenade. My breath is still Alt though, so perhaps Alt is always bound (I moved it to Hold-To-Walk to mimic previous game controls). Try rebinding your melee/'nade button elsewhere to separate them.

I've tried rebinding my favorites key from q, to f, which to me makes far, far, far more sense, yet I'm still stuck using q instead. Yeah man, keybinding royally blows.

I just checked Settings/Controls for the list of available keybindings. Bash/Power Attack/Grenade are all bound together using just the one key. But Hold Breath while sniping isn't even listed as a key binding option.

Using Q in the pipboy, yes. But not playing the world. Which personally I'm fine with; I use the number keys to quickselect (not that radial) so the only time I use favourites at all is binding things in the pipboy.

Actually, after posting that I opted in for the beta patch and all is good now with that. I've also noticed that looting containers is now bound to enter rather than E, which is fine by me. I only wish they'd do something with the lockpicking keys now, they are still bound to WASD. most of the rest I could deal with.

Interesting, but if I understand you correctly, they've only switched some keys but it's still hardcoded, right ?

Yeah, it is annoying for all the things you said and because some strange choices ( Sometimes you exit with esc, sometimes with tab, etc ?? ) And it is worse for esdf players or left handed...

The only way is using "autohotkeys". Just do not understand why the hardcoded keys.