Since the topic got bumped...
I like the Ergodox, but I've never been confortable with high angle. Maybe it'll come later, but I don't like anything close to 50-55 let alone 70 (and it's a pain to get high angles with good stability anyway). I don't see while the thickness has to do with tenting, though?
Not that I'm reluctant to vertical keyboards, I'm playing accordion
But high angle or not, I definitively don't like the thumb cluster position. With any angle, my thumb fall on the inner large key, and I feel it should fall on the outer one (especially if you want to be able to reach the farthest 1u key) Besides, the fact that there's a hole on the other side of the inner key means you waste an easily reachable position.
So I'm definitively designing my own ergodox with basically only this change: move the thumb cluster inwards till the inner 2u key "touch" the lower row (in order to not get rid of any keys, that means changing a 1.5u to a 1u).
That being said, since I redesign it, I change two other things: 1u for pinkie outer column instead of 1.5u (I never understood the 1.5u choice, since I'm pressing them off-center to avoid overextending the pinkie, switches don't work as well) and slightly raising some columns (Logitech wave-way without having sculptured keycaps, unfortunately)
but for C on staggered qwerty board, it's easier and a shorter move to do using index, and it' doesn't require a hand move at all.
I totally agree, and I never understood why most typing schools advocate middle finger on C. Most, not all, the typing school I use actually suggest it. So C would definitively be under F if I used a QWERTY layout on an Ergodox. That being said, the fact that there's only 10 keys on the bottom row on Ergodox means following this logic bring an issue for B (I have a letter on the lower 1.5u on mine, but that would probably feel strange on "official" layout).
That being said, the "1 key = 1 finger" rule is bad to me, and as far as I know, (one of) the fastest typer(s) uses different fingers for the same key depending on the flow/situation. The most obvious case is TR bigram, I'll never use index for both, it's so much easier/efficient to use middle finger on R in this case.