It has been 3 months now since I got into this alternative keyboard layout 'madness' :) and I am so glad that I did. My hands were sore after a keyboard practice session with 'QWERTY', but with Colemak i feel like i can go on for hours without pain.

Colemak or Colemak-dh both are wonderful, however I will try to share my experience on why I chose Colemak vanilla in the end, in case it helps somebody else maybe.

My initial intention was to decide on a layout and stick with it while leveraging other people's insights and past experiences. However, I've come to the conclusion that this is a highly subjective matter and keyboard layouts that look good on paper might feel different during daily usage.

I started with Colemak then used another variant of Colemak that swaps D and P etc. I became good at it however, Colemak-DH seemed to get a lot of praise from people that had spent countless hours on researching this subject. So I moved on to Colemak Mod-DH to try it out and hoped to prove my doubts wrong.

Here is my progress with Colemak-DH after practicing almost 40 hours on keybr.com :

I also practiced on MonkeyType almost 40 hours as well.
English 100+ avg.
Eng 1k 95+ avg.
Eng 10k 90+ avg.

My biggest issue with mod-DH was the constant movement of up and down between top and bottom rows. Even after I passed some speed threshold, this kept bothering me. After practicing and using it almost 100hrs, eventually I decided to go back to original Colemak which I felt more comfortable with.
'D' and 'H' are pretty common in English and in my opinion it is more comfortable to keep them on the home row to help with fluidity. Since my hands are using home row more than any other row; it's easy to reach other rows without jumping around much. I know these kind of things were discussed many times before. I am just sharing my humble experience.

I understand that this is highly subjective and I guess trying different things out might be the best way to help finding the answer.

Cheers !