Ha, that's a fun analogy. If I understand it, you're saying the 'lift' is the menu bar (soon to be ribbon). Which, if I were to reuse the comparison, is more like walking down the street to your neighbour's building, climbing up _their_ drainpipe and jumping across rooftops to get to your apartment.
The menu bar is just not near enough to the "context" of managing what you want to manage. None of us would really like to click on hyperlinks in a webpage, then go up to the menu bar and click "open/copy/paste" to use said hyperlink. Just as the majority don't seem to like doing the same with files.
The ribbon is about as "front and centre" as you can get for an app, so I can't read your analogy in any way that makes sense to me.
Look. Context menus are useful but lots of people don't find them. In fact, MS added something to apps such as Outlook that addresses your comment about commands being near to the content that they work on, but presents the UI in a more discoverable form. Not sure what it's called, but it's a popup toolbar that fades into view next to your text selection, allowing access to text styling such as bold, italic, etc.
I find that in practice, I know where these commands are on the ribbon - they never move - and have no problem moving the mouse pointer to there, to click them. So, I tend not to use the contextual popup.
For nearness and discoverability, perhaps MS could try this UI again with Explorer and see if people liked it.
I just meant the ribbon is far away from the files one is managing (relatively).
Your example of the 'popup toolbar' is exactly the sort of thing I might expect to make the context menu more discoverable; but if it's been tried and didn't work, then the point could be moot. Perhaps utilizing some space next to the filename for the most common actions would suffice. I just think having the available actions closer to where you're working, on-screen, would provide a better experience with less scanning and less movement.
In any case, I'll continue to hide any such menu bar wherever possible :)
The menu bar is just not near enough to the "context" of managing what you want to manage. None of us would really like to click on hyperlinks in a webpage, then go up to the menu bar and click "open/copy/paste" to use said hyperlink. Just as the majority don't seem to like doing the same with files.