Right now, with (e)xamine you can do, among other things: “open” and take stuff from containers, use computers and card readers, disarm traps (or tents or roll mats…), forage wild vegetables (or strawberries, or poppy flowers…), climb fences, etc, etc, etc.
It has a bazillion of uses based on context, and only one of them is actually to “examine” things.
Renaming (e)xamine to “int(e)ract” would probably solve this confusion. Another option would be to remove the interaction with objects from (e)xamine and give that functionality to the (a)ctivate key, expanding its scope beyond inventory items, so it can be used with world objects too.
One of the latest examples of the ambiguity of that key description can be read here.
I’m not convinced it needs to be moved/renamed. I am a sample size of one(1) but I didn’t have any issues figuring it out. You have to examine something before you can figure out what to do with it.
Also, moving some functionality to the A key would make some sense. Activating pulleys or computers or card swipers makes sense. But I’m not sure it’d be worth the effort. And I’m not sure how you would have one command that can either be used on the viewscreen or in inventory. There’s no other command that does that, everything either goes to your inventory or brings up a cursor in the viewscreen.
I agree there’s some cognitive dissonance involved with “look at”, “pick up”, and “interact with” all being the same key, and there are a few (one?) places where it does both, which makes it irritating (foraging).
It’s definitely worth some thought, but I’m not sure having a separate activate or interact key is the answer