On the other hand, how often do you type any search engine into the URL field? It's either bookmarked or it's automatically set as your search engine.

Actually, the use case is more for someone like me - I remember that I want to try DDG once in a while, so I decide to visit it, and then I can't remember the shortcut and am annoyed that I have to type in the whole name.

Obviously serious users of DDG don't have any problem with it.