Indeed, the pinky is surprisingly fast and dexterous! Well, maybe not so surprising considering that the outermost fingers on each hand have the most varied tasks.
But it does lack some strength. The ring finger is a lot stronger but a lot less dexterous, so it should have a common letter on its home position but not too common letters on the stretch positions I think.
So, the pinkies do have a lot of dexterous work already. They are in charge of a set of modifiers and special keys each, that make them fly about and prove their worth.
Many typists experience pinky fatigue. Therefore, optimized layouts tend to give them a little or a lot less work load, despite their rapidity. Myself, I recommend using a Wide ergo mod to shift some of the right pinky's load to the strong index fingers.
A statistic like the one you show does have some caveats though. It's not immediately obvious that the speeds would've been the same on another layout given equal conditions otherwise. I think some letters flow better than others, depending on their most common n-grams.
Last edited by DreymaR (28-Aug-2017 09:47:08)