I was in a similar situation when trying to learn Colemak. Practicing common trigrams and words helped me break that barrier.  Here is a list of common words and trigrams in English.

I would think that the bottleneck is your brain, not your hands. Your hands can move really quickly; the problem is that it takes your brain a while to decide where they should go. Typing becomes fast when that decision is automatic, subconscious. By practicing common words and trigrams, you make that decision automatic, moving the apartment from your brain to your hands. I should think.

I definitely feel as if my mind is the bottleneck here.  And my accuracy could definitely be improved.  My problem there is, by focusing on improving my accuracy, my speed suffers.  So far, it seems like I'm stuck; I have to choose one or the other.  And it's a double-edged sword; if my accuracy goes down too much, of course I end up with the same result: reduced overall speed.  Occasionally, I also get a minor confusion where I have to think for a couple seconds before I remember where the next keys are, but that's nowhere near as bad as it was in the first two weeks or so... and it usually happens when I type faster at the expense of accuracy.  Either way, that seems to firmly position my average speed in the 30s.

Now that I typed this though, I think my typing *does* feel slower in general than it was on QWERTY.  So clearly I must just not be there yet.  Which leads me to wonder just how many more weeks of typing it will take to get back to the 50s/60 (my goal).  Hopefully not months... I still would like to give Colemak a try, and possibly CarpalX QGMLWB.

No, actually I have only a standard QWERTY keyboard.  I briefly looked at an image of the Dvorak layout when I first switched, and soon got some blank labels that I wrote the letters of all changed keys on.  Kept the labels on, replacing them as needed for about two weeks, after which I just removed them as they wore off.  I have since removed all of them, so now I'm back to using QWERTY keys.  Like I mentioned though, I do not look at the board any more; I stopped needing them within the first month.

And holy shit... that guy's fingers look like they're going into convulsions or something!  Damn, that's fast.  I think I'd be happy at 80-100 WPM if I could manage that... but I'll just stay realistic here and aim for ~60 at least, which is a much more likely goal to reach.

I didn't become a Colemaker because I was fast, but with Colemak I've become faster. I can't say whether the same amount of dedication with another layout would've produced the same benefits. With QWERTY I did 50-55 WPM, with Dvorak 55-60 WPM and with Colemak I've reached some 65-70 WPM (not counting peak speeds because they're not usually in play).

UltraZelda64
>Which leads me to wonder just how many more weeks of typing it will take to get back to the 50s/60 (my goal).  Hopefully not months...

Well it depends how impressionable your mind is.   I actually suspect that it will take you a good year or so to get very comfortable with the new layout.  This April I'll hit the three year mark touch typing with Dvorak.  It's taken about this long to become at ease with the layout. 

Your shortcuts will enter as you become more proficient and confident.  I've tried for fun typing with less fingers - like typing without the pinkies - and I can pretty much do it (slower of course), but it does suggest that I'm becoming more adept at keyboarding.

Considering I'm realtively new to touch typing, and I now trot along at about 50/60 wpm, with the occasional gallop, it must be attainable for others - as I'm old and a little decrepit.  It just requires practice and patience.  It is probably best if you just forget about speed until it finds you.

If you look at Sean Wrona typing, you can see how contorted his body is, his left shoulder is much lower than the right, it looks really asymmetrical, probably the standard keyboard and Qwerty conspiring againts him.  I bet that's not healthy in the long run.  Probably why my right shoulder isn't that happy.  He's quite fast though, I'll give him that.

Hmm... I will probably just continue to practice often then, and hopefully that will help to speed things up.  It's just weird that I got up to a decent speed and relatively comfortable typing within a month, and then all of a sudden it's like I hit a brick wall.  Maybe I'll be lucky and this is just a period where everything settles, so sooner or later I can get back to speeding up.  I just thought, maybe incorrectly, that because I wasn't already a speed demon to begin with, It shouldn't take too long to get near my previous average.  Then again... I guess this is only like a month and a half, so maybe I'm just getting impatient.

My fastest on Hi-Games with Dvorak last night was 41 or 42 WPM... I was hoping for just a few higher.  Oh well.  Still not bad for a minute of sustained copying, really... that always was one of my weak points in typing; copying word for word exactly instead of just what comes to mind.  One thing I noticed, one of the words that seems to never fail to give me trouble is "people."  Errors galore if I attempt to type it at full speed, and even when typing slower I have to put extra thought into it.

By the way, I tried QWERTY on TypeRacer last night just for the hell of it... I can get 10-15 WPM and obscene numbers of errors (literally it seems like every other keypress).  Heh... my skills of that layout have been utterly destroyed.  I don't really care though, because Dvorak should be a stock option on every single computer I come across.  It would help to remember most of the bottom row and punctuation, though, for when I give a few of the other layouts a try.