This is probably the biggest issue I have with the update, I keep hitting ctrl-tab to change between selection of vert/face/edge, which brings up a menu to change between several modes… Is it possible to change the selection back to the old hotkey? 1-2-3 selection sure is faster and would probably be fine for me if I didn’t already have 1,000 hours of doing it the other way…
Cody, although I’m in complete agreement with you regarding the muscle memory we’ve developed using Blender for some time now (I’m still hitting W for subdivide!), I say give 1, 2, 3 another chance. You’ll finally get used to it and as you yourself said, it is faster and easier.
If that’s not acceptable, I believe you can set all the hotkeys to 2.79 settings in the Preferences dialog, but that probably opens another can of worms.
As my friend’s grandfather used to say, “You want my opinion?..Do what you want.” 
I’m enjoying some time off, binging on old King of the Hill episodes, and I totally read that in Cotton’s voice.
In the case it isn’t acceptable, the question is how to change it. The hotkey changing interface isn’t very intuitive. If such a menu to select between the 3 already existed in the keybinds, I could just change which key it’s bound to, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s defaultly applied to any key (if it still exists at all)
In the Keymap page of the preferences dialog, at the top is a drop down that lets you search by key binding. Select that and then type 1 in the search bar. Scroll down and you will find, under Mesh, the Select Mode command which you can change. Do the same for 2 and 3
That’s helpful, but at the same time I’m not sure if that will allow the call of a context menu, instead of just binding the selections to 3 different keys. I want to ctrl+shift and have the little menu pop up like the old version.