It's always nice to see our Australian friends being interested in Ergo boards too :). All jokes aside, nice board!
For the price, at the moment I would say they are not worth it. 2$ a switch for X vs 1$ a switch for Chocs
The brown switches feel good, blues need a little bit too much force for my liking. The keycaps have no shape to them and was not a good experience stock. I resin printed a slight dish shape to glue on top, night and day difference in typing feel.
Maybe I will get some pictures, and make a second post... eventually.
New to Lemmy, so I'll link to my single post "blog".
I have since gone back and made another board. It is 17mm spacing and removed the number row as I didn't use it much.
Ben Vallack made a video really close to your question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOupyi-lQZM annnnd of course ~14 months later he found a better way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT3TToFqqEU
My keyboard designs are unibody with a slight split, very similar to the lumberjack. when I break it apart , a slight angle really makes it comfortable to use. but nothing really beats having your arms shoulder width apart, as it helps put the shoulder blades sit in a more natural placement.
Just did the math out of curiosity. NVMe averages 4000mb/s (worst case) SATA averages 600mb/s (best case)
It would take about 7 disks to get nearly the same speeds.
Average 4TB NVMe seems to be about 200-250$ 8x cheap as dirt 512MB SSD seems to be about 240$
So if you do not have an NVMe slot on your old mobo but do have 8x spare SATA slots, you could get the same or .5 TB less of space at nearly the same speed, for nearly the same price. You would gain the added benefits of raidZ1 on ZFS, something NVMe on one slot does not give.
This also gets pretty interesting because those could be cheap 1TB disks and you now have 7-8TB of space for around 320$ (depending on raid)
I think it comes down to what kind of motherboard the user has and if they want raid for uptime/disaster recovery.
I went from ~70wpm on a QWERTY Model M to ~30wpm standard Planck in about 1 month. It's been over one year now, and I switch between the two seemlessly, average 80-90wpm on a good day.
I know you asked layout (keymap) and not layout (key position/count) but it's very similar to relearn muscle memory.
I never really did typing games/practice. My job is on a computer so... 7ish hours a day? That's my only insight, just stick to it.