Hey Jason
it’s not really what you’re after, but i found/made a script for applying an effect, which you can then assign to hotkeys using KeyEd (google it). So I have a few of my key effects assigned to hotkeys within AE, and it works really nicely.
See this post :
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/227/12690
You’d need to paste that script into a script file (there are some already in the AE scripts folder, just copy and replace one). Then you go into AE and assign hotkeys in KeyEd Up to “Run script #…”.
There’s a bit of fiddling involved, so if you’re actually going to do it, i will explain a bit further, but its a little messy.