It's not a very nuanced description. If anything, this small community is very varied. I'm not sure whether I would qualify as a fanboy or not in McKay's eyes, as I'm certainly enthusiastic and quite nerdy about it but at the same time I try to live and let live. I'll counter arguments that I feel aren't right and I won't be shy about it, but have no problems whatsoever with people disagreeing with me in general.

Maybe he made up his mind too soon based on unrepresentative evidence, who knows? He doesn't seem like a sourpuss judging from that page. At any rate, it must be mildly frustrating for him to try and find the right choice for him and his Kinesis between the different options.

I'd think that with a Kinesis maybe some other layout may be best - I've no idea. Arensito was made on a Kinesis iirc (but I think it works best for Norwegian Unix/Linux Kinesis users?). One idea behind Colemak was to allow people to switch layouts without buying (and carrying around) new hardware - obviously that won't be a problem for all users!

Since he likes "geeky but nice" he may yet end up with an unmarked Colemak Kinesis - or a mindlink.  :)

Dissing this community for the Wikipedia debacle strikes me as a bit ass-forward though. In my mind, the biggest problem in that department hasn't been Colemak fanbois but knights of the Wiki? And maybe our own lack of understanding of the Wikipedia's finer workings as well; I looked at McKay's newest page (http://www.jamesmckay.net/2007/09/) and found it interesting to note some mechanisms he as an experienced wikipedist describes.

Well, I strongly disagree with your conclusions but you are entitled to your personal experience. 

I am not a programmer or someone spends hours a day typing on blogs and such.  I spend much more time talking and visiting business owners in their offices.  I went through school before the time of the personal computer (I used punch cards in college.).  Touch typing class was seen as something you took if you wanted to be a secretary.  So I never learned to touch type.  Since computers, I thought occasionally it might be worth learning to touch type for productivity sake. Every time I looked into Qwerty seemed like a horrible system learn if you weren't a child.  Since I learned Colemak on my Macbook, I have been noticing just how many business owners using their computers are NOT touch typing on their Qwerty keyboards.  So I know there are a many out there in the 40's, 50's like me that are not using their qwerty boards with any thing more than 2-3 fingers.    Colemak made it easy for me to learn to touch type (I tried Dvorak briefly, that was just weird, and the location of L (ugh!), no thank you.).  It's not an issue of comfort for me.  It's an issue of touch typing at all.

as you said YMMV.

Hmmm, you're right there, maybe I did let it colour my opinions of Colemak a bit unduly at the time.

Something that I found rather interesting though was that Colemak and the Kinesis Advantage keyboard seem almost like two pieces of a jigsaw. Both Dvorak and Colemak gave me quite a lot of discomfort on a conventional flat keyboard, which disappeared when I switched back to qwerty. However, on the Kinesis I found that the converse was true: Dvorak and Colemak both worked rather well, but it I found it almost totally unusable with qwerty. The reason why I didn't stick with Colemak/Kinesis in the end was that I work a lot with curly-brackety languages such as C# and JavaScript, and the Kinesis sucks lemons for that kind of thing no matter what keyboard layout you are using. If I had only been using it for typing text, it would probably be a different story.

Mainly a discomfort in my right forearm. I think it probably is partly the row staggering that did it.

What I found was that Colemak almost forces you to adopt the proper disciplines for touch typing, and the Kinesis keyboard does the same. However, both the row staggering on conventional keyboards and the qwerty layout tend to fight against touch typing the "proper" way and favour a more free-form approach. It felt to me as if the keyboard and the layout were fighting against each other somehow.

The other thing I noticed is that with qwerty your right hand has a kind of natural resting position on the J, I, O and P keys rather than the home row, and I think that on a flat keyboard this allows your wrists to adopt a more comfortable angle, a bit like with a split keyboard. With Dvorak and Colemak, on the other hand, your hands are forced closer together and into a more uncomfortable angle on a flat keyboard.

My conclusion was that for me it was pretty much a case of all or nothing: either Colemak on the Kinesis, or qwerty on something more conventional. My gut feeling is that I'd find the two alternatives more or less the same in terms of speed and comfort in the end of the day, but that's no doubt mainly because I've been typing qwerty for years and the muscle memory is pretty deepy ingrained.

Hmmm I haven't tried that one.

In case you hadn't noticed, I finally decided (just over a couple of weeks ago) to go Colemak in the end. I'm now approaching 60wpm and I can safely say it's definitely been the right decision. It seems to go quite nicely with my new Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard too.

(I eventually gave up on the Kinesis though. It just wasn't working out.)