I was a bit worried about some of that missing functionality - just turned it back to RMB - and yeah, you're absolutely right. I thought stuff like alt-click not working was me just losing my mind. I wanted to learn the new stuff just because I don't want to end up bound to a bunch of input conventions that will end up depreciated - and I don't really care that much about LMB and RMB, or indeed any of the old blender UI, but I don't want to start using the tools on the left, since they are, as you say, useless. I'm more a 'select things, do an operation on them' kinda guy, so using a tool in edit mode (with a few exceptions) is kinda neither here nor there.