In a perfect world, yes, you're right. But a request for dedicated/discrete IR commands has been on the Wish List at DIRECTV for over a year with no indication we'll ever see it. (Compare that to many of the other requests on the Wish List that DIRECTV has fulfilled.)

That's why I think we won't see progress on this front until we see the redesigned remote. I don't know the full list of changes, but I know it will have at least one new key: a "soft-key" that a user can program through the receiver's GUI to perform any function from a predefined list of functions.