YMMV; juggling thru a menu instead of having a key combination would be equally painful to me. All whining put aside it's not that difficult to modify
/assets/javascript/editor.js to do just that - I did this 7+ years ago and can perfectly turn multiple lines into a
BBCode list with bullets thru ALT+SHIFT+L, while ALT+SHIFT+W asks me for either a text or a URI based on what is selected. An alternative is to write your own
userscript so it works on every
phpBB installation, not just the ones you can manage.