I would welcome that, yes. After the bug of the machine not turning off completely anymore is fixed, in what scenario would you have to regularly press circle+0?
Yes, the convenience issue will solve itself when the shutdown issue is fixed. And I still have my own F1+F12 hotkey patch, which I use all the time because I just never turn off the laptop manually anymore. The foam pads work just fine.
Side question about this actually - because I don’t know the Pi Pico in details: does doing sleep_us() or sleep_ms() drop the power draw (i.e. is it a true sleep or a wait loop)? Because when my foam pads keep F1 and F12 depressed with the lid closed, I could very well check the matrix every second or so to check if the keys are released instead of scanning the matrix all the time, to drop the power usage some more.
Side question #2: is there interest for my F1+F12 power-off patch? I would like to submit it as a PR (after @minute is done reworking the keyboard firmware to his liking I suppose). It’s really a nice safety addition in conjunction with the foam pads trick, and it has zero side effects if you don’t stick foam pads on the bezel. If it was mainlined, I wouldn’t have to maintain it as a separate patch 
As I said, I didn’t try it. I was just reading the code, and it looked like doing Circle-<any risk-key> always brought up the confirmation menu.
I’ll try it soon when I get back home.
Like I explained previously, my problem is that I keep hitting Circle when I try to hit Backspace (decades of muscle memory is a bitch) and when I hit Circle-anything, I don’t want the keyboard to react in any way whatsoever - be it a menu, the screen turning on or anything - with perhaps the exception of Circle-1. Although I usually turn on the laptop with a long press on Circle when it’s off instead.
That’s why I much, MUCH prefer a shifty Circle key. I find the keyboard way too much in the way for its own good: it’s a keyboard and I don’t care about its inner life. So I want activating its various functions to be quick, yet as awkward as possible on purpose. A shifty Circle key achieves that easily.