[chrisBob]

It is interesting that you think arrow keys are a likely blocker. I have a Kinesis Freestyle Pro and my favorite feature is having the arrow keys on the second layer as vim style HJKL. I also have backspace, esc and del on the second layer with the right half of the space bar as the layer shift key. Moving these common keys made a huge difference to me, and was an easy transition since I exercise them so much.

The reason I couldn't move to a much smaller keyboard is that the less common keys that I use a few times a day like `{}\<>? feel like they would be so much harder to retrain. Similarly I am only passable at touch typing my number row, and I don't think I could survive without the labels for the symbols that are usually over the numbers.