-anything smaller than TKL is hipster nonsense.
I can see why a lot of people would think that, but honestly, for some software engineers, the smaller form factor makes a lot of sense.........................
Needless to say, you make valid points. Jumping around from mouse to arrow keys to nav cluster to alphas isn't as efficient as learning to do everything near the home row as you have. But I'd argue that you'd be even more productive with a bigger keyboard, especially since you could remap the arrow keys, nav cluster, etc. to shortcuts and macros.
I'm a programmer too, and it annoyed me that frequently-pressed characters like &"%${}() are dotted around haphazardly around the board, most requiring +shift. So I moved all my F keys to the numpad, and now I have all those characters neatly arranged in single-shot keys (ie. no +shift required) just above the number row:
Similarly, I think the standard layout of the 4 basic math operators is madness: + and - next to each other with one requiring a shift but not the other, * over to the left requiring shift, and / orphaned far below nowhere near the numbers. You've no doubt learnt to use them quickly, but I'm sure you'll agree it's not exactly an ideal layout, and obviously wasn't conceived with heavy math usage in mind. Since I no longer have F keys up top, I've replaced F9 and F10 with / and *, so I now have a lovely little square cluster for /*-+. And I no longer need to press shift for +, as I've moved = to its own key in the F11 slot. In the F12 slot is a little macro I built that converts any selected string with a mathemetically calculated answer (ie. If I select 1.2*3/(4.5-6.7) it will convert it to -1.636). (yes, my current keycap mixture is a stylistic mess! - I'm working on it
)
I have other keys that bring up popup menus of frequently used phrases or glyphs. And another that can be pressed in conjunction with { to wrap a selection with curly brackets {xxxx} , in conjunction with $ to wrap it with Str$(xxxx) (to convert a value into a string), or with Q to wrap Quote tags in a forum. None of these shortcuts require a bigger keyboard per se, but the more keys you have at your disposal, the easier it is to add them to your workflow, and the more likely that you'll be able to do so without over-reliance on convoluted and hard-to-remember modifier/layer combinations.
Multitasking can also be made easier if you have keys to spare. I have a devoted arrow-like cluster on my macropad just for window navigation. The left/right keys move the current window to adjacent monitors, the up/down keys maximise /minimise, while the northwest key centres (and shrinks) the current window, while the northeast key stretches it top-to-bottom. If I hold CTRL, these keys turn into docking keys, snapping the current window to the left/right/top/bottom half of the screen, or in the case of the northeast and northwest keys, to the top-left or top-right corners. All of this can be achieved with regular hotkeys of course, but not as quickly and intuitively as with a dedicated arrow-like cluster like this:
Below that, I have another dedicated cluster that utilises a slightly altered version of alt-tabbing. The southwest key activates the persistent version of alt-tab (alt-ctrl-tab) on
press and spacebar on
release. What this means is while I hold it down, I can use the arrow keys to move left/right through the paneled windows (no need to switch between tab and shift-tab which is much slower). I can press the north key (mapped to delete) to close the currently selected window. When I release, spacebar brings to focus the currently selected window (required for the alt-ctrl-tab variant, which doesn't normally do anything on release as it's persistent).
While I think the functionality above would be useful for a great many users, the point is not to convince people of my own preferred macros and UX hacks, but to encourage people to implement their own, suited to their own particular workflow and needs. The standard ANSI/ISO layouts have a great many inherent usability flaws, and every compact or alternative layout I've seen inherits those flaws and/or adds new limitations. Same with Windows OS shortcuts (case in point above: moving/docking/maximising/minimising/stretching windows are all functionally similar yet use wildly different hotkey combinations that are cumbersome to combine). So when I personally look at a a 60% or whatever layout, yes, I see the compactness, elegance, and ergonomics, but most of all I see stripped potential and an enforcement to do many things the hard way.
But I'm not normal, so maybe it's just me