I also have a kinesis advantage 2 with some insanely nice switches, but never use it just because of the learning curve.
I couldn’t make the corne variants work because tucking my thumbs hurt. The ergodox is too big. Even a keyboard like the ZSA Voyager just doesn’t fit me right. However, the glove80, running a 40 key layout that I’ve come up with after doing a fair amount of heat mapping my own keystrokes, gets rid of all my hand and wrist discomfort. My only complaint is what a hassle it is to haul around.
The only “wisdom” (hard earned) I would pass along is:
- Make a heat map of your keyboard over a few days to see what keys you need.
- tweak your layout to make it easy and comfortable to get to the keys and key combos you use.
- remember you do NOT have to use every key!