As someone mentioned above, it learns your habits. It irritated me at first, as any fairly major feature change would, but it is pretty awesome and useful.

When I find that I visit a site so often that I habitually key in the first few characters, hit down, and hit enter, it is time to bookmark it and give it a keyword (in a bookmark's properties). After doing so, (as an example) if I go to the bar and type 'hn' and hit enter, it automatically takes me to http://news.ycombinator.com/. I think using this feature would benefit you, and maybe ease your hatred to mild distaste, and, just maybe, eventually you'll even _like_ the Awesome Bar.

I wish you luck.