I’ve been using a moonlander for a couple years now. I love it, but I’ve been toying with the idea of building my own with a trackball in the thumb cluster

On my Moonlander, I have:

• Left
  • Top piano key: press for space, hold for alt
  • Middle piano key: Windows key
  • Bottom piano key: hold for layer shift to make my right split a numpad
  • Red “any” key: move to virtual desktop left
• Right
  • Top piano key: backspace
  • Middle piano key: enter
  • Bottom piano key: tap for one shot to VSCode macro layer
  • Red “any” key: move to virtual desktop right

I got a Moonlander ~1-1.5 years ago (made by the same company that does the Ergodox). I’ll say that yes, there is an initial slowdown in typing speed as you learn ortholinear, but I find it to be so much more comfortable than the traditional staggered layout. I broke a lot of my bad typing habits similar to your Y->T mixup.

I think it’s also made me a better typist on traditional keyboards as well - I mainly use my Moonlander, but will need to use a traditional keyboard 1-2 times a day when running meetings in conference rooms. It did take me maybe 3 weeks to get up to ~70% of my normal typing speed, and then the last 30% came from me tweaking my layers and building the layout that’s comfortable to me.

I’m constantly iterating to make it more and more comfortable to use common keys (just last week, I changed my layout because I use the -> and => key sequences a lot when writing code, but I still need to tweak it more). Being able to change keymappings is a must for any keyboard, IMO.

Thumb clusters are 👌👌👌