: If wave conditions are low enough that I'm comfortable trying to
: reach behind me on the
: rear deck and try to open a small day hatch (what do you do with
: the lid?) and reach
: into a hole and fish around for something, I just think it's a hell
: of lot easier to leave
: more room behind my seat for the same gear and just pop the spray
: skirt and reach
: behind the seat.

We recently got an NDK Romany, a boat with a day hatch.
The lid is tethered, so it just 'flops' when it's off the hatch.
I was surprised how easy it is to reach down into 'the hole' when seated in the cockpit; definitely as easy as reaching behind my back/seat. Getting the hatch cover back on one-handed can be tricky; I probably need to practice more.
The Romany has a sloping bulkhead behind the (sloping back of) the seat (great idea- you can easily get most (99%?) of the water dumped out of the boat during rescues or on shore), so there's not much room to store stuff there anyway.
Most of the time we just raft up and access the day hatch. It's my wife's boat and my drybag with keys and wallet, and the on-water snacks, IKEA bag, throw line (just about useless but legal requirement in Canada), lunch, etc all go back there.
One improvement would be to make the day hatch access only half the width of the boat - NDK just puts two full-width bulkheads across the boat in the aft compartment.
Another problem with the NDK arrangement is that the day hatch affects the deck line arrangement. There's not a good set of lines to control the paddle during a paddlefloat re-entry, and not everybody has the hand size or grip strength to control the paddle shaft by grabbing the coaming.
Our NDK dealer (BodyBoatBlade) provided a smoother VCP hatch cover to replace the NDK 'top hat' version which does tend to snag if you are tired and doing a cowboy/scramble re-entry.

Some of the Epic boats have a very slick-looking hinged day-hatch lid:
http://www.epickayaks.com/news/news/epic-xseries-upgrades