Question: This is not just gnome terminal, but pretty much all gnome windows: When you hold the "alt" key, you can press the first letter of one of the menu items. This will let you scroll that menu without clicking on it directly.

This is okay on any other window, like say Firefox, but on gnome terminal, it steals the keys I use for emacs!! There is very little chance of me learning a new set key combinations if I can avoid.

If I can't isolate this just to gnome terminal, I'm fine with that.

Answer: 
Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts..., and uncheck "Enable menu access keys".
This is really driving me crazy too. I'd like to use Alt-V for paste as it is much more ergonomic than using CTRL but this doesn't seem possible because of the View menu option. 

Overall this seems like a bug because when I disable the hotkeys in Preferences I am no longer able to use Alt-V for accessing the View menu but I am also not able to use that combination for other things. 

I was able to get Alt-Z to work because there is no menu beginning with Z.