Please do not add whole projects as reviewer, this is spamming all members' mailboxes...

I'm not sure just removing the shortcut is the best solution to this problem. I'm not sure if people rely on this shortcut, but we probably shouldn't remove it without either finding an alternative or making sure that people don't use it.

I would suggest that alt-click would be a good way to replace this. Granted it would likely require adding some functionality to the select operator, but it would be consistent with mesh edit mode.

Sound like an great exercise. Any pointers to useful code I can take a peak?

I assume it would be a relatively straightforward combination of the ideas of the mesh loop select operator (MESH_OT_loop_select) and curve selection.

I would add a new operator that first runs regular curve selection (ED_curve_editnurb_select_pick) and then runs the row selection code. It would be nice if it could select columns too based on the edge you select, but I imagine that might increase the scope of the task.

If you're interested feel free to take a look! And also don't hesitate to ask on blender.chat if you have other questions. If any of what I said turns out not to make sense, another route may be best.

I reassigned the key mapping to select a row to "alt + mouse selection button". It has now a similar behavior to MESH_OT_loop_select. However, the edge selection feature is not implemented yet. That's what I will do next. You are right. This should be more or less straight forward.