Honestly, nearly everything beats the mouse in one way or another. The problem is availability… and habits.
Mouse buttons are impossible to click without risking an unwanted cursor movement. Therefore, gripping—sometimes too tight—is pretty much necessary. The shape forces only a very limited amount of ways to grip the mouse, click buttons or rotate the wheel. Moving the cursor without risking an accidental click isn't exactly straightforward either, although it isn't that much of a deal for most healthy people.
Neither symmetrical trackballs, nor rollermice (or similar devices) have any of these issues.
Moreover, most mice are rather low quality these days.
Special keys are in pretty bad spots on the 'standard' keyboard.
This is true, but everything else just feels so out of place for me even when I try to get used to it. What do you suggest I try instead of the mice of today? After this post I decided I'm just going to leave my touch pad plugged in, buy a cheaper tablet, and switch to my left hand every once in awhile.
Not sure if I understand correctly, but seems you tried to map macros to some keyboard buttons? Have you tried plainly mapping mousebuttons 1:1 to keyboard keys instead?
I do it in 2 steps:
First, remap an unused non-modifier key to a convenient location with remapkey.exe (intuitive GUI-tool) from this toolkit: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657
Then make this key a mouse-key-modifier in Autohotkey.
You might also want to take a look at nonmechanical keyboards like the Lenovo Compact USB Keyboard Show Image
(http://i.imgur.com/dIK4Y7Z.jpg)
(typing on it right now, chiclet-wise I consider it one of the best).
Lastly, there's the "Single-Click to open an item (point to select)" in Windows' Folder Options. You can turn off point-to-select, in the registry, should it become annoying, and use ctrl+click instead (I'll attach reg-files that work for Windows 8, but should also work for the others).
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I did try mapping 1:1, and thanks, I'll take a look at everything else!
Mouse microswitches are awful. Something less stiff with 2+ mm of travel makes a big improvement. I find Cherry ML switches are pretty good for mouse switches, though my hacked together prototype was pretty half-assed, and fell apart after a week of use.
If there is something like this on the market, I would definitely pay for it ._.