I find this interesting but I think a standard is at least as valuable as a more ergonomic keyboard layout. Now if you move away from qwerty to any of the advanced layout then you probably would have an advantage in English. For other languages it probably would be a bit hit and miss. You could also create a new layout for other languages, I fact that’s what people have done. With that you would face quite different layout depending on in which country you are in. And that is if really everyone switches to only one new layout. Otherwise work, home, friends would all have different keyboard layouts.

Anyway this thought always stopped me

good point. maybe switch to Colemak or similar if you write in English most of the time anyway. one could also add umlauts or other special characters to existing alternative layouts, so you are not forced back to the standard layout whenever you need to write in your native language (in case it’s not English)

At what point do you give up, and learn stenography/Plover instead?