CJ, we have a way to assign out own shortcuts to change the case (for the commands available in Type > Change Case).
Just go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and assign those you want. Or did you do that already?

As for the BIU — well, 51 users needed that. Plus BIU are hidden and don’t offense anybody. Who cares about similarities with Word if it has something useful we can use in Ai? Hardly an insult :)

I would find the ability to change case quickly *far more useful than the BIU, especially in illustrator where aesthetics count. BIU makes things look like a corporate MS Word memo.

InDesign uses Ctrl+Shift+B and Ctrl+Shift+I for these.
In Illustrator these are also taken by, Toggle Bounding Box and Toggle Perspective Grid... but changing these seems less harmful than taking away Paste in Back and Spellchecking.
What do you think?

In case you wonder — Corel Draw has it for years. And almost literally every tool has too.

Everybody got used to it, I know.
And there are way more font weights and styles than Bold and Italics, sure, especially in slow but inevitable advance of whatever-you-slide-your-sliders fonts..
And some fonts prefer to display as separate entities in font families list, instead of being one family and several styles (sure Ai should merge them!)

But sometimes it is so much faster to press Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I while editing....
Unfortunately Ai don’t know what it is. It Pastes in Back and Checks Spelling instead.

I think you should add these, and use them only when user is in text edit mode.
You should allow users to customize these too.

And CTRL+U for underline. For Italic, most programs use CTRL+I.

ctrl + B is not working in illustrator

If you're interested in this feature, see this suggestion (which is a bit more comprehensive) and add your vote: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-feature-requests/suggestions/32307397-increment-decrement-stroke-weight-key-commands

It would be useful if, while typing/editing text, there was a keyboard shortcut to add BOLD or ITALICS - highlight the word, hit CTRL + B to bold, for example.