Yes, checkout the Tarmac transitional layouts developed by our one and only DreymaR!  A number of forum users have learned Colemak in steps this way.

Basic Qwerty "row swap" layouts have been discussed a few times as well on this forum, for example here.  Basically, they are better than Qwerty (obviously), but not by sufficient margin to justify the learning effort, better go with a smarter optimized layout.

Over at the Colemak Discord server, few people see the point. I think it may be because those folks are dedicated adopters/optimizers, willing to take an initial hit to productivity in order to get to the end point fast and efficiently. Tarmak is mainly for the ones who cannot go all in but are patient.

Not sure how cutting-edge people view ASETNIOP to be vs Colemak but I'd wager it's considered far more avantgarde? So by the above logic, if anyone brave enough to try their hand at it is nearly always also brave and foolhardy enough to dive right in – then there won't be a market for a set of transition layouts.

At any rate, I'd think you shouldn't make more than, say, 4–5 steps. Many don't want even that many, and people tend not to understand intuitively that you can just skip a step whenever you feel like it.

There's only six key changes total!  :)  So maybe two intermediates with a pair of changes each.

I need to run it through the CarpalX software to see how well it does - I'm very curious.

People often seem to put a lot of faith in the patorjk analyser, despite it being unclear how its scores are calculated.

When I first got interested in alternative layouts, I was keen to explore minimal-change layouts on the basis that a few smaller changes can make a big difference, and ASETNIOP would be in that category. I know you are trying to avoid finger swaps, but one change I would do is switch P with R. That single switch gives you a common letter on the home row, eliminates the RT, RG, FR same-finger bigrams, and improves hand balance.

With all these approaches, I think the problem tends to be once you start off deviating from the standard, it becomes a rabbit hole where you are likely to always be unsatisfied until you reach a fully optimized layout. But in fairness anything that encourages people to think about keyboard design and efficiency, so that they consider using something other than Qwerty, has to be a good thing.

Pinky fu! Pinky fu! Fear my pinky fu!  ☆*:.｡. o(⁎≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆