I think if it more as a friendly, if spirited design discussion and incredibly generous gift to the community in advance of shipping. (I really appreciate all the thought and effort everyone has put in).
Roughly that’s what we’re trying to do with the 100 unit PVT run, except the default cap set is QWERTY, not blank.
Unfortunately, the timing ends up rather tight. So having a 99% sure plan before we ship is a HUGE help to us.
Just wanted to chime in to mention the Esrille NISSE, which is one of the most similar keyboards out there, and has this standard Dvorak layout:
That’s what I’ve been typing on for a while now, and I can make the following observations (mostly coding in vim):
What about MWVZ? 
@boris actually suggested that above in comment 125.
I’d be fine with that. The main reason I preferred others was that the square brackets could be kept in the same spots as they are on qwerty.
For some reason I find it appealing to have brackets and braces placed on the right side mirroring the punctuation on the left, using my middle two fingers. Of course I still want the C and R keys there as well; how difficult is it to chord Fn+Shift in order to access the braces if we were to have, for example, the C key be [ with Fn and { with Fn+Shift?
With the stock thumb arc layout, Fn+Shift is very easy, you just have to push both your thumb and your palm. It may take a bit of time to get used to doing this, but getting used to the palm key takes time anyway.
The mirroring is a nice idea but it’d mean the arrows can no longer be in that home spot.
Also I could have sworn there was a reason to not have the brackets and braces overloading the same key, with some requiring function-shift or some other combination, but that reason is escaping me. Something to do with further chording, maybe? Maybe it was that control-{ would then be control-fn-shift-C, which would probably be rather awkward? (Is control-{ or control-} used for anything…?)
Programmability of this fully functional keyboarding station? 
I know I’m months late to this conversation, but I personally in favor RLVZ.
@jesse, I saw via another thread you currently have this on keycaps-all.svg:
I think there was pretty good consensus here in the Dvorak camp that a dedicated \| key was desirable in the bottom right, and stacking PgUp and PgDn on the same key was a nice way to make this possible (leaving =+ to go far left home row). A few such sample layouts (printed labels would be identical in each case) are in this post from December, for example this:
It’s not clear whether you considered this and decided against it or if you didn’t see the suggestions. If the latter, is it too late to change what’s printed?
@bjn I spent a lot of time looking at all of the work folks out into figuring out layout options here.
I ultimately decided that for the nonstandard symbolic placement on the standard legends I wanted to stick closer to the layout we developed for QWERTY.
-j
I respect that. Thanks.
Good thing I ordered two sets of Linear A and two sets of unpainted in addition to the two sets of Dvorak then. 
Is there a final layout somewhere that I can see??
I’m sorry but, I can’t see what the final Dvorak layout would look like?
Thanks @jesse, the standard legends look fine to me, is there a reason why it doesn’t have any function key symbols etc.
My suspicion is that having function key symbols and the like would make the keys too crowded, unless you put them into the top-right corner, in which case they’ll be closer to the LED of the adjacent key than their own, which wouldn’t look all that good.
But I seem to remember Jesse explaining something like this, somewhere. Will try to dig that up, and will edit this reply if I find it.
My reasoning was a little different in the end – it seemed like many of the Dvorak typists had different opinions about where the various function-shifted symbols should go. By skipping them, it helps make the legends ‘less wrong’ for more people.
