You can peel back levels of a crafting menu by pressing tab repeatedly, but when you actually want to close out of it, you need a completely different key (return) or need to click exit with the mouse. In the asinine column, for example, is not being able to completely exit a given submenu using the same key you used to back up through various levels of that same menu.
Its elements range from not intuitive to muddled to completely asinine.
