I had to learn CVS which I never used before... Anyway, several files were just committed, with fixes and rewrites regarding the arrow keys in selector and node editor. Now they all work consistently to move by absolute or screen (with alt) distance, normal or 10x (with shift) speed.
node-context.c was rewritten so that there's only one switch and every key checks its own modifiers. This made it a bit more bulky but now it's much more orthogonal and therefore easier to add new shortcuts.
I have created a wiki page:
http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KeyboardShortcuts
(imported from sodipodi) where I will track my progress with keyboard. Ideally, I would like to see the program almost totally controllable from keyboard, with only the tasks like freehand drawing left to mouse. Hopefully I will have some free time in the coming months to advance towards this goal.