But you're using it as intended. I'd much rather type "!gi blah" or "!gn blah" than move my hands to the mouse/trackpad to click on the Google Images or News link.
I use bookmark keywords to get access to a cluster or folder of bookmarks instead of mousing. Also not interested in making 9000 bookmarks to reproduce bang functionality: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"
I'm not sure what you mean by wait. It really Works For Me (TM) here. I just type im foo in the address bar and it goes straight to Google images search for foo. Same for maps, Wikipedia and some obscure websites which will never be available at DDG :)