I think the creativity here should be applauded, it's an interesting novel improvement to an existing pattern. I think it'd be very interesting to do a bit of a formal usability study on this: set some metrics for common tasks and ask people to do them versus a control group and see how well it performs. I think sometimes we get all caught up with the hype of UX, but a good old study like we did back when we called the field HCI would be enlightening here. You could even get a published paper out of it!