Believe it or not this is not the first time having advanced mode turned off has confused someone - modders, players, everyone seems to run into this. What if every keypress which was ignored due to Advanced Mode being toggled off generated a notification which said something like "Keypress disabled because 'Enable advanced functions' is toggled off in Options>Gameplay" I think that a message of that type would really elucidate things for everyone. Currently what's happening is both arbitrary and not transparent. I've been caught by it multiple times, both in the past and recently when I installed the game on a new PC or cleared my cache settings. It's simply not clear to the player what's happening to them and in this case I think that there's an easy fix. I've attached a mockup for clarity.
Ah yep. The original idea was to prevent new users from accidentally using any debug stuff (which they find confusing). In the last update we changed all such bindings, from plain 'somekey', to 'ctrl+somekey'. This should have been accompanied by removing the 'advanced mode' influence on bindings, but the change didn't make it in time for the update, I implemented it a few days too late. It will be there in the next public update though, so all bindings will work all the time
