[stephen_g]

Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a standard piano because they’re fitting all the notes in a single row instead of two? But I’ve never seen one in real life, let alone tried to play one.

I wouldn’t say that the standard keyboard is designed the way it is to make any one key “easier”, it’s more just the result of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and it’s just happens to be that one key doesn’t have sharps or flats so you don’t need the black keys, so it’s easier at first… Thinking of it in the way you said is probably unhelpful.

Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill, especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after finding the first note.