Agree, there's actually not much point to move them wildly. Keys like Z, X, (and even Q) are in below average positions, but since they are infrequent letters, it's perfectly sensible.
There is a legitimate query over C and V, but it depends greatly on your finger technique, and whether or not you use the angle mod / DH mods.

This is where Dvorak falls down I think: It completely changes everything, even those rare keys that are reasonably placed in Qwerty, resulting in harder learning curve for no extra benefit.

I think the idea of Dvorak was to be an alternative layout for manual typewriters and it was intended as a first layout.  So you'd never notice.  Colemak is more an evolutionary layout for Qwerty touch typists.

It depends a _lot_ on your algorithm though, and most sensible algorithms will show at best little benefit of moving for instance Q and Z I think.

So the real question is, do you consider similarity to QWERTY a benefit to be included in your calculations, or not? If you're willing to change everything and trust your algorithm enough to put all the keys into its hands then you _may_ be able to eke out a slightly better layout than Colemak for your choices, sure!

But I don't think it'll be _significantly_ better, and I think it'll be open to debate for whom it'll be better, and I don't think it will be worth it overall, for most people. But do prove me wrong, by all means! ;-)

Yes, Qwerty must die !!! xD I find Colemak a very good layout! IF I had learned to touch type in Qwerty, I would absolutely switch to Colemak. I don't use Colemak - explanation below - but like you, I find layout wars utterly useless. About as useless as Windows/OSX/Linux wars. My layout of choice is a custom AdNW-version, but I also find Colemak and its variants, stock AdNW, Dvorak, MTGAP, Capewell, Carpalx, Minimak and Maltron interesting.

Layouts other than Qwerty that I did try out (for longer or shorter periods):
- Colemak  (short, but I liked it, easy to learn)
- Dvorak ((short, good idea but can be improved), hard to learn)
- MTGAP (2 versions, one 'stock' and one for Dutch/ English) (these ones I tried for longer periods, liked them a lot, but I grew to dislike the rolls. Plus they were unbalanced left/right.  Easy to learn despite being totally different from Qwerty. My theory is: rolls are easier to learn than alternations. ) 
- several AdNW-versions (long, harder to learn than Colemak or MTGAP but easier than Dvorak. My hands prefered this familiy of layouts over the others)
- two Carpalx-versions (short, can't say about learnability, but I did not like the feel)

Of the layouts I tried, I found Colemak, AdNW and MTGAP the best ones.

Why didn't go with Colemak?
1. I did not know how to proper type in Qwerty. Staying close to Qwerty is not important to me.
2. Sometimes I suffer from light hand pains. I found that one handed typing of ctrl-Z, ctrl-X etc. was painful. Therefore, the 'Holy Quadrinity' (just kdding) of ctrl-z, ctrl-x, ctrl-c and ctrl-v is not important to me.
3. Colemak is very good for English and several other languages, but I type mostly Dutch. Colemak has much same finger use for typing Dutch
4. I thought. "when I'm learning a new layout, why not go all the way and make the best one for my use? "
5. i found that I prefer not having too long strings on each hand. I left MTGAP because of that. Rolls and all are nice, yes, but I also like a high alternation.

  Indeed, that is not my point. Being different from Qwerty is not a 'bonus' or something.

True, but moving them makes room for other letters, that may have impact.

Point taken. Worded in a sloppy way by me. I meant: "I think Dvorak was right his decision to move rare letters, but he did not do it in a right way". And agreed, this is pedantic, since I cannot possibly know what exactly Dvorak was thinking. Anyway, my view is that for English, Colemak is better than Dvorak. According to Dreymar, for the Skandinavian languages the same is true. I also know that Davkol is a happy Chech typing Colemak user. 

However, for some languages Colemak works not so well. For instance for Dutch and German. To be clear, it still is miles ahead of Qwerty :) But, the remarkable thing is that Dvorak works very for German - for which is was not designed ! For Dutch (which is much closer to German than to English) the same is true.

True

You are right. Colemak is easier to learn then Dvorak(type) layouts. 

  OK, Colemak DH moves them to the bottom row. I agree with you that those bottom row spots are of home row quality.  In my personal AdNW-layout I adjusted the weights of these locations, and put some much used characters ont the bottom row.

At the moment it is not in the algorithm, would be interesting to put it in though. I can imaging that a user might be neutral, positive or negative towards 'resemblance to Qwerty'

Hi Steve, a Dutch/German Colemak version is actually a very good idea, thanks!

AdNW means Aus den Neuen Welt, which means From the New World. The name hints at the (competing) German Neo-layout. AdNW emerged from discussions about that layout, the issue being if it was possible to have one single layout that outperformed Dvorak both in English and in German. AdNW claims it does (and my fingers believe that claim). So in this case we don't have a Spy who came in from the cold but, a bit more prosaic, a layout that came from the Neo world. At the same time (I believe this is an insider secret  ;-)  )  the name hints at a composition of Dvorak (the composer !): the New World Symphony. Who said that developers don't understand culture, language or music ?  :D     

Anyway, the AdNW layout is supposed to be better than Dvorak for German and for English.I know it is better for Dutch as well. (The Dutch language is related to German). Actually, the "stock" AdNW (meaning optimized for 50% German, 50% English) is much better for English then my layout. And for Dutch it does better at inward rolls, at the expense of much more same finger movement.

My personal layout is this:

AdNW-NL_EN - for Dutch and English. Like old Dutch typewriters, it has a dedicated ij key (Unicode 0133)
* edit: I have decided to call this the SAEIO layout *
buy,! qkvmlfj
saeio gdtnrw
z:.ij/ pcmhx

Stock AdNW is optimized for German and English and looks like this: 
KUÜ.Ä VGCLJF
HIEAO DTRNSß
XYÖ,Q BPWMZ

For English, you could of course put other things on the Umlaut-keys, such as 
ku$.! vgcljf
hieao dtrns@
xy:,q bpmwmz

Anyway, I am happy with my layout - but it is not perfect...

I am not at my own computer now, so I used the patorjk.com analyser. For fun. Comparison of
- Colemak
- Colemak DV
- Colemak SpeedMorph - a versin I remember from the forum, some guy came up with a version for Dutch:
   qwbg pjluy;
   ardts hneio
   zxcvf km,./
- Dvorak
- My Dutch AdNW version

I fed it with a long Dutch legal text. Total scores of Patorjk are not so important and it's not about "winning". But My own layout ranks by far the best, followed by (roughly equal total scores) the three Colemak variants and Dvorak. The Colemaks have the lowest pinky use (good!).

But look at the 'same finger use'. ( I hope patorjk.com calkculates these correctly !) I excluded instances of the same key being pressed twice in a row (example: typing "ff"). These are the numbers:

      LeftPinky  LeftRing  LeftMiddle  LeftIndex RightIndex RightMiddle  RightRing RightPinky         Total
QWERTY	    427        30       7.005      3.709        715        474         268        426        13.054
Colemak	    438       170         644      1.641      1.826        189          12        545         5.465
SAEIO	    152        29           1        139        476        268         164        596         1.825

You see, to type this piece of Dutch text, Qwerty has over 13 thousand times the consecutive use a finger. Worst offender is the left middle finger. This must be DE (the Dutch word for "THE", of course a very common word). Also bad is the left index. A finger that types very common letters like R, T and G.  And indeed, bigrams such as TR, RT, GR, GT are very common in Dutch.

Colemak is much, much better. For every 100 same finger uses, Colemak only has 42. A reduction of 56%, which is great. But still... much more consecutive finger use as in English texts. Worst offeners are the left index (PT, TP, and GT are common). And the right index: (ML, LM, KL, LK, JL, JM, JN, the list goes on...)  SAEIO (my Dutch AdNW version) performs much better, with less than twothousand same fingers. I'm not saying it is perfect though...).  But for every 100 same finger uses in Qwerty, Colemak only has 42 but SAEIO has only 14.

Of course this is not the only factor. Others, like "distance", hoe jumps, etc, are also relevant. I only posted this to show that a weak point of Colemak for typing Dutch is the same finger use. I did not give the figures, but "Colemak SpeedMorph" did not do better. Which shows that it's hard to improve a layout usig the "eyeball method"  :-)   Anyway, a "Dutch Colemak" shoudl focus on this weak point, maybe there is a Colemak version lurking somewhere that is much better. And, let's not forget, despite this criticism, Colemak does much better than Qwerty.

Hi Ghen, thanks for the reply (van een mede-Nederlandstalige !  of a fellow Dutch-speaker ! )

Good to hear that those digraphs are in reality not a problem. Reality > Theory :D

No problem !  De gustibus not disputandum est ! [/quote

In The Netherlands, no one uses it either. Actually, it is discouraged. But but but..... when you type it feels very logic. One sound, one key. And we have that Unicode character after all. Also, it allowed me to put the J on the right pinky, because I use it much less now the J is no longer typed when it forms part of the digraph.

I think it's a silly 'romantic' idea of mine to use that Dutch letter. An ode to old typewriters... But to be honest, if I could change our spelling, I would ditch the IJ and just use the Y for it, just like in Afrikaans. The ij was invented to replace ii  which looked to much like an u when written by hand. But what have we got now? The ij is fine, but the IJ looks a hell like.... an U    !     This in constrast to the y and Y that are very clear. And that are alsow used in Skandinavia, and also in our minority language province Fryslân.......    But I disgress.....   Thanks again

Edit: typo

I meant that as far as I know, the digraph ij is not used in DK, SE, NO; but the letter Y is. A word like ny (Nynorsk) is just like our dialect word nij. It means new.  Correct me if I am wrong. If I had the power, I would ditch the ij from our spelling and use the letter y instead.

Every language has its stupdities in spelling. English has the dumb thing that they use one letter combination (th) for both thorn and ieth. The sound th in thought is not the sound of the th in those   The first one (thought) is called a thorn, the second one (those) is called and eth. In Icelandic they (still) have both of those old Germanic letters. I thought of those would be spelled I þought of ðose.

In Dutch, the mistake (in my view, all of these are of course very first world problems :D) was the letter ij. It started as a double ii, a long i.  In to avoid confusion between ii and u in written text (where writers sometimes forgot to put the proverbial dots on the i), they decided to make on i longer. So now, we had the short i and the long ij

On typewriters there was a seperate key for the letter ij  As far as I know, most did not have a capital, so that had to be typed with two letters: IJ. 

The alfabet rules of the Dutch language are unclear about the status of the letter. Our alfabet has the same 26 letters as English. So letter 25 is the Y. The IJ does not have a seperate entry in the alfabet. Dictionaries have struggled with this. In the past, names were not spelled very strictly. The name Ysbrand may be spelled IJsbrand as well. Therefore, telephone directories regarded both the Y and the IJ as the 25th letter of the alfabet.  (an analogy to English would be that they put the "letter" ph together with the f, so that you won't have to think if Sophia is perhaps spelled as Sofia).

But nowadays the official rule is that the ij are two letters. Strangely, both letters must be capitalized. So a sentence starting with ijs (meaning: ice) must start with IJs.

Since some years, there are nice Unicode characters: U0133 ( ij  ) and U0132 ( IJ ) This means that on a computer it is now possible to type the digraph with one key. In most fonts, U 0133 looks exactly like two separate letters (i j).

Here it is in a normal sans serif font:
First using the Unicode characters, then with two seperate letters:
IJzer is fijn. IJs, ijs, glijden over 't ijs.   
IJzer is fijn. IJs, ijs, glijden over 't ijs.   

On most fonts, this will look 100% the same. Be it that you delete letters, the Unicode will be deleted as a whole (because it is 1 "letter")

Only in monospaced fonts there is a difference.

First using the Unicode characters, then with two seperate letters: 
IJzer is fijn. IJs, ijs, glijden over 't ijs.   
IJzer is fijn. IJs, ijs, glijden over 't ijs.   

To my eyes, the Unicode lowercase looks better, but the Unicode uppercase looks too much like the capital U. Ironically, confusion of ii and u was exactly the reason to invent the digraph ij .....

Lowercases compared, then Uppercases compared. First Unicode characters, then two seperate letters: 
fijn zeg: ijs. glijden over 't ijs.   
fijn zeg: ijs. glijden over 't ijs.   

IJzer en IJs. IJzig GLIJDEN. MUREN MIJLEN RIJKSMUSEUM
IJzer en IJs. IJzig GLIJDEN. MUREN MIJLEN RIJKSMUSEUM

For comparison: if we would spell with the letter y, it would be much clearer.
In fact, in South Africa one of the languages is Afrikaans, a spin-off of Dutch. 
They do precisely that: spell with letter y. 

Yzer en Ys. Yzig GLYDEN. MUREN MYLEN RYKSMUSEUM
yzer en ys. Yzig glyden. Muren mylen ryksmuseum

Using 1 Unicode sign instead of seperate i j has (I found out) the following pros and cons:
Pros:
* faster typing, using only 1 key instead of 2.
* introducing an seperate ij-key allows for the j to be put in a different spot. The J is an often used letter in Dutch. But (my analysis), moer than half of the J's actually form part of an IJ combination. So by giving that combination its own key, the J gets much rarer. But ij and j can now be placed in more optimal spots.
* typing feels a little bit more fluent: one sound, one key.
* it's an ode to history
* it's being different for being different :p

Cons:
* Not all fonts recognise the digraph. Some fonts render ugly blocks. Or don't include a nice italic etc.
* Programs see the unicode as a different character than i + j.  So a spell checker will have problems, and finding strings gets difficult.
* Google does understand that U0133 = i + j  but most other websites and engines do not.
* most web forms, password forms and so on, will not allow using these sort of Unicode characters.....

Hmmm.... I understand why it is discouraged to use this combination.... maybe I better change the layout again.....or perhaps change to Colemak :)

I understand you like the ligature for linguistic/historical reasons, but just put it on AltrGr+Y. ;-)
These ligatures should not be used in non-typographic context, for reasons you said; computers won't recognize them (in searching, indexing, spell correction, ...) unless explicitly programmed for this.

Eg. my wife's name is Sofie, and on a pretty typesetted invitation card I will render that as "Sofie" (with ligature "fi"), but nowhere else.

Different story of course for some other ligatures like æ or œ which are proper letters in some languages.

Pieter, instead of having a ij-key (the ligature), you can also have a ij-key (two separate letters). This has most of the pros, but none of the cons.
In PKL, you can just have 'ij' on a letter. In XKB, you can use a custom compose file. If you make a .XCompose file in your home directory with

include "%L"
<U0133> : "ij" U0133
<U0132> : "IJ" U0132

inside, the ij-ligature will be converted to the 2-letter sequence ij.
(The 'include "%L"' part will include the default compose sequences.)