I've known of Archy and The Humane Interface for about ten years, and it's funny how more and more interfaces are converging towards the interaction style defined by it (with some tweaks because of backwards compatibility and-or because some of the ideas in the book have been tested and improved since then).
All this was done in a zoomable interface, so it was very easy to navigate the sets. The system was a huge success.
Here is a short video. Sorry about the quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLy6Qj7MNOo
As Steve Yegge points out in Effective Emacs (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs), mousing through a menu is very inefficient, even when you're learning or exploring. They don't scale well, can't possibly cover all the options, and once you've dug down two or three deep, you're sort of trapped. Whereas with decent tab completion, you can backward-kill or just plain <DEL> your way back up the heierarchy.