I think they shouldn't use modifiers at all, ideally you would enter the mode with MODIFIER+modekey and then press the normal keys: q2c. I don't know if that's possible with your current program but that's what I meant.
It's a cool project but again I'm not sure what I would gain from the modes, counts and motions. Right now I use Awesome WM which is really similar to howm without changing modes, and without using the motions and counts (but I don't really find myself wanting to use counts to move windows).
It would require more data to be sent backwards and forwards to the X11 server, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue.