Hi Juice,

Being the creator of those pages, my answer to your question is of course: Yes! 

But it mainly depends on how you feel about the centre column keys, especially D and H.  Some people don't really like the frequent lateral movement of the hand that is required for D and H in their standard Colemak positions, especially for example for typing the very common bigram HE.  I believe the Workman layout was created largely in response to this problem, but I say Mod DH is a simpler, more elegant and also a more Colemak-friendly solution. 

Since you have been using Colemak for many years, you might be well adapted to D and H and not see any need to change. To get a feel for it, you could try typing "the" a few times, both in the standard Colemak pattern and the Mod DH one. I think those bottom-row index-finger keys are extremely comfortable to reach, and practically home row in quality. In fact, I have noticed since using Mod DH my index fingers tend to hover slightly below the centre of the T and N keys, ready to reach for D and H on the lower row, making them almost effortless.

The downside is of course, the worse M and (if you already use the angle mod), worse B.  But these are much less frequent keys, so the overall gain is positive in my view.

Not sure how many switchers there are, but most who have tried it (or one its variants, such as DreymaR's lite version) like it as far as I'm aware.

An interesting report.  I'm not surprised the non-angle-mod version didn't work out, that method is not recommended. Since you don't use the angle mod, I wonder if you are not using the "standard" finger technique, and instead using your index finger for C?  That's certainly what I used to do.  If that's the case switching to Mod DH is made more difficult by the fact you have to relearn C on the middle finger, which is the technically correct one, but nevertheless quite difficult as it feels more comfortable on the index finger on a standard ANSI board.  Perhaps that would account for you not liking the angle mod?

The angle mod does of course work less well on ANSI keyboards, although there have been some interesting suggestions, e.g. this one.

Thanks for trying it out anyway, it's good to get feedback, whether people liked it or not.  You are the first to have reported trying it out but not liking it as far as I know!  For those that are OK with the centre-column D and H, there is of course no need to change anything, it's not surprising that some experienced Colemakers will fall into that category.

Making  custom layouts is indeed a rabbit hole. But, fun! Some people may know that I use a custom made AdnW version for my language. Once you go the "custom" route, there are many many possibilities. What worked for me is this:
- find a base layout that you like. Could be Colemak, Dvorak, Carpalx, Mtgap, AdnW, Capewell, etc. Just try them out, see how they feel. Think for yourself how much similarity to Qwerty you need.
- see if the standard works for you. Often it does.
- if not, modify, or recalculate a new layout. I feel that larger changes should be based on an algorithm, please don't design a layout by hand. Smaller modifications on the other hand should just be tried out in real life. Just swap those 2 or 3 keys and start typing, see how that feels.

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