Glad I could help!
My instinctive guess is that the first keyboard shortcuts you tried were in use by some active application.
The name picker idea is really only the tip of the iceberg for presentation scripting. You could also use the remote to call up a Keyboard Maestro palette and then choose between options—useful, say, for running a quick multiple choice question with a class in which the options explain why a given choice is correct or not. If statements in KM also provide some room for dynamism: e.g., “if [some slide] is open, do this” should be possible, though I haven’t tried it.