I'm a big fan of compiling my own kernel with all needed drivers compiled in, with the EFI stub compiled in, no initram, no grub, a fixed cmdline that works 99% of times.
This allows a boot to happen in less than 5 seconds.
The 1% of times I need something different, I use the boot selector provided by the firmware to boot to grub (that's installed anyway), where I have the usual plethora of choices.
Is there a key to be pressed at the right moment? There is. I even have to insert a password. So what? I can go through such ordeal once in a while for that 1% of "special" boots.
I completely agree, over time I've found myself moving to doing exactly this on every system I run. On UEFI systems, I can use the UEFI shell to add kernel command line options or launch a fallback kernel if I've screwed up badly enough to break boot. I don't need yet another layer of clunky menus and indirection.
This allows a boot to happen in less than 5 seconds.
The 1% of times I need something different, I use the boot selector provided by the firmware to boot to grub (that's installed anyway), where I have the usual plethora of choices.
Is there a key to be pressed at the right moment? There is. I even have to insert a password. So what? I can go through such ordeal once in a while for that 1% of "special" boots.