Earlier quoted context omitted.
A customer of mine uses Kanbanize to organize software development. Think Trello on steroids. I imagine that instead of dragging cards to their destination we could open a menu and select the destination column. Maybe that would be even faster sometimes. However reordering cards inside a column without drag and drop would be a pain: Move Up, Move Down buttons, no thanks.
I don't disagree, this is a great example. I think d&d can work in special cases where the distance for the item to travel is not too small (so that you wouldn't move things by accident), but it is also not uncomfortably far away so that you don't see the target and have to navigate to it while you're d&d-ing. I guess these limiting factors are what makes it tricky to get right. But what about selecting a card and be…
Gut feeling again: the keyboard could be more effective on larger distances because each tap of a key is a full movement of one row or one column, and no mistakes.
People using a mouse probably need more time to release the mouse and move their hand back to the keyboard, unless they are left handed: mouse on the left and right hand already close to the arrow keys.
About drag and drop: it's a mess if you can't see both source and destination at the same time. Then you drag hoping to be headed into the right direction. A right click menu could be better in those cases.