OK, something I hadn’t taken into consideration here is that the up cursor would then be clashing with the default qwerty layout’s position for the } symbol, and so alternative layouts which would adhere to my suggestion would no longer be able to have the braces in the same place as they are in qwerty.
I propose in light of this that by convention the braces would be on R1C10 and R1C11 (that’s qwerty Y and U), which is one space to the left of the current design. To be totally clear, I mean to include the default qwerty layout in this.
This in turn displaces “play/pause”, but I’m assuming the placement of that was somewhat arbitrary and so its relocation would not be a problem.
Any thoughts?