Wow, I just thought of using an activator action for this... After 5 min I'm already hooked.
Haha awesome! Since I integrate sbsettings into notification center and disable the drop down window, that frees up the status bar left and right swipe. So I assign one of those to quick compose. I love it. Also when I receive a text and if I see the banner notification, I just use quick compose to respond. I have my quick compose to auto show recents so I can quickly respond to the new text and also have it so that when I use the conversation pull down window in quick compose it marks that most recent text message as read. So as you can see I use the activator action swipe status bar for quick compose a lot.