[ideasman42]

You need to consider

* How much time you are willing to invest in learning something "different/cusotm".

* How much time are you interested to spend setting up your custom layout.

* How much do you care about muscle memory with other keyboards you're likely to come across.

For example, why not use something like https://svalboard.com (seealso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand)

Or, do you prefer regular keys - split/ortholinear ... etc. (ergodox, dactyl... etc).