This must be some new weird change with the most recent version. The version I use has F as the fullscreen button, and either F or ESC will exit fullscreen. And the controls auto-hide.
No, F11 is the only way documented in the menu to get full-screen playback. F is not documented anywhere in the player UI; instead, it's buried away in the keybinding section of the preferences. The whole point of showing accelerators in the menu is to enable keyboard shortcuts for frequent commands to be learned; that VLC doesn't do this consistently is, alone, an indictment of its UI.
F11 and Alt-Enter are generally the two idioms for getting full-screen behaviour on Windows. Both work in Media Player Classic. Alt-Enter comes from the old DOS box from Windows 3; I'm not sure, but I think IE 4 pioneered F11. In any case, F11 works with Firefox, Chrome and IE; Alt-Enter also works with IE, Mintty, etc.
Nop. 2.0.5 here (2.0.8 is the latest) and f works just fine. I guess barrkel had enough time to whine on a forum but not enough to look in the program's preferences.
That's why I stick to the 1.1.5 version!