@lasse Thanks for your suggestions, I’m looking at your layout and will probably steal a couple of ideas from that and other layouts in pursuit of one that works for me.
Another of the problems I have is to often press Fn instead of Shift, because I have some symbols in the Fn layer (e.g { } [ ] \ )and some others in shifted keys, and it gets confusing quickly, so I’m thinking to have my Fn layer such that all keys except for letters are TOPSY(key) of what they would be in the main layer, so pressing Fn has the same effect of pressing Shift. That of course would mean moving F1-F12 somewhere else, so I’m not super sure I’ll come up with something good.
I also found this thread where this guy has a pretty interesting layout, and specifically, the arrow keys are in the main layer in place of tab, esc, enter, butterfly (resp. left, right, up, down):
Not sure how I feel about having the arrow cluster split between left and right hand, but maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
I really hope I don’t end up giving up on this keyboard, but at the end of the day, I’ll have to be practical, if I cannot come up with a working layout and my hands are still in pain (unlike with the Kinesis) then I’ll park/sell/get rid of this keyboard, and wait till @jesse comes up with a 72+ keys version …