Do you know of any articles/research into putting the home pinky keys on the bottom row (where the Z and / are on qwerty)?
The pinkys are a lot shorter and on columnar layouts, like the TEK and ErgoDox, that might be a much better place.
When I put my pinky's there it feels a lot more natural.
Haven't seen anything like that, but your point is valid (especially in my case, with my short pinkies (pics somewhere on Den's site).
It is similar to your idea of putting what are traditional "pinky" keys on ring and middle in eNNe... in truth I actually use my ring for those outside keys (on MS Ergo Natural keyboard), because of short pinkies.
Downside is that for pinky then to move to top two rows is increased distance, which will affect score.
So what PROBABLY should happen is that the form factor should take it into account, and lower the entire pinky columns by one unit or so.
Think I must see if I can build that into the ErgoLinear layout. The lack of stagger in ErgoLinear bothers me, but when I tried it long ago on early Programmer's Keyboard layouts, it just looked "messy", and I ended up with a regular grid.
I was actually browsing online for books on "keyboard design" and only found one short book from around 1993, no longer in print.
There's probably more "useful" info to be had by doing searches on the Patent websites... there's a LOT of patents on keyboards, most of which it seems never made it to production. So just wasted money by inventor, and block against people trying to improve. Also US patent system seems oblivious to prior art and grants patents on 'obvious' things. Which is why I decided against trying to patent either ErgoLinear or Seelpy (which is actually a "fresh" idea in keyboard design).
eg I took this one
https://www.google.es/patents/US3929216and improved it (at least as far as KLA is concerned).
Here's scoring on Alice (Den 1), against top layouts in same form factor:
But the text provides useful info, and there's a long list of other patents at the bottom which may provide further ideas....