This has been a contentious topic: Artists at the Blender-Studio prefer this behavior, while the user community overwhelmingly prefers 2.7x operator search. Previously this defaulted to accessing tools (eg: Space-T activates transform.. Space-R rotate etc) which I still believe is a better long term default - otherwise we don't have efficient tool switching for a system we intend to make more use of, nevertheless as far as I can tell users haven't been keen on adopting this so far. Show the preference on the setup screen since many users don't animate and will may want to quickly search or switch tools.