For German devs it makes sense to use a no dead keys keyboard layout IMHO. You rarely need the accents anyways and it saves a lot of time when coding. I made the switch a long time ago and don't regret it. For the occasional word like "Expose", I just leave off the accent and that's that.
But don't you need 4 keystrokes for the common alternative, {} enclosed template expressions? Same as french, nordic, and probably lots of other european intl layouts.
(Or even better against the {{ }} ones requiring 6)
"{" on a french keyboard is two key presses but at the same time (alt gr and 4), while ^ is two key presses one after the other, which makes it a bit slower. Most editors will also insert the corresponding } when you create a {. That makes in my experience {} faster than ^ and {{}} as fast as ^.
{} is still a common complaint in my circle of programmer friends and everyone has seriously thought even once about switching to an english/american keyboard, but then there's the issue of switching back when writing stuff in french (é by itself almost ruins the idea).
I use a Spanish keyboard but with US layout on top. I normally let autocorrect deal with special Spanish characters, but just switch layout if I’m writing something longer.