The input system of Quake3 is handled using a Keybinding relay, whereby each keypress is matched against a 'binding' which is then passed to the CLI along with a time stamp of when the keypress (or release) occurred.

I just wanted to get an idea from developers what they considered to be the key benefits of designing your input system around this approach?
One thing i don't particularly like is the appending of the timestamp to the bound command. This seems like a bit of a hack to bend the CLI into handling the games input?
Also I feel that detecting the keypress only to add the command to a stream of text that gets parsed at a later date to be a slightly latent way of responding to input? (or is this unfounded?)

The only real benefit i can see is that it allows you to bind 'complex' commands to keypresses; like 'switch weapon;+fire;' for example. Or maybe for journaling purposes?

Thanks for any insights!