Yes I agree, and this is the reason I propose an external app. This would solve the problem of overloaded keyboard. Imagine you long press the camera key and a window opens, that allows you to issue Esc, or F1,2,n, or issue a close command to the window manager.
Better yet, this could be an extension to the already used Ctrl-Sym key combination which brings on the extended charset.

BTW could it be possible to add Esc to that charset? I'll dig into that now