IMHO, staggered QWERTY is bad only if you
- place the keyboard with the alphanumeric area in the centre, and
- force the left hand into typing in columns according to the classic touch-typing method (which would put the wrist in a weird angle and use completely wrong column offsets forcing you to move the hand forwards and backwards).
A staggered QWERTY keyboard works best if placed shifted slightly to the left. Myself, I use a TKL with a small mouse pad to the right and I place the centre of
both of these combined in front of the centre of my computer screen.
Only my right hand is oriented into the classic "touch-typing" columns. My left wrist is oriented straight up but slanting more. The left hand's "columns" are arcs of WSZ, EDX, RFC, etc. not lines of WSX, EDC, RFV.
I once studied three right-hand columns: right middle-finger, ring-finger and first pinky column, comparing those in QWERTY against
M-system - which is a Japanese columnar system, with several keyboards made in the '80s.
I found that the right-hand middle-finger and pinky columns actually had the same column offset to one-another in both layouts, within an error of two millimetres. The ring finger column differed more. The index finger columns were worse but that finger is more agile which would make up for the difference.
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I then started to sketch on a custom keyboard that would be a middle-ground between staggered QWERTY and columnar M-system on the right hand, and symmetrically mirrored to the left. I also experimented with having slightly curved key wells. The idea was to get a more ergonomic layout for touch-typists while retaining the overall familiar look of a staggered keyboard thus designing it to be more accessible to more people. I put the project on a shelf because of the need for custom-shaped keycaps and the difficulty of creating curved key-wells. I still have a partial mock-up and several thick keycaps with the corners filed down...
More recently, I have been looking at instead making a split keyboard with a symmetric stagger (much like the
µTron) because that would allow for standard keycaps to be used.
I am personally not a fan of ortholinear keyboards. There should be proper offsets between columns. The ErgoDox has half as big offsets as it should have IMHO. The M-system was designed after real human hands.