That sounds useful - for some. Others will cry if you make their tag chars less accessible I guess. Yet others will find it a hassle to learn even more new locations. All in all, it shouldn't matter much for typing speed since those glyphs are rare.

Thus, it may be a perfectly good thing to do on your own but won't find its' way into the official Colemak I think.

BTW: Did you read this? https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=375

Even if you did do progamming, you wouldn't use <> much. I personally find it very easy to hit shift-period or shift-comma, and it's harder to hit shift-9 or shift-0, so I think ( and ) should be on the punctuation. This is also beneficial for some programming languages; I use ( and ) in Ruby a lot more than < and >. But I also think ! and ? need a new place, possibly on the same key. They are both very common compared to some punctuation.

I've thought that too. The problem with a bigger keyboard is that it'll take more space. Stretching up and down already goes about as far as I'm interested in (except for rare symbols - I could use a new row on top for those because they'd be easy to find there!), and sidewards stretch means both that your outmost fingers get even more to do and that the keyboard takes up more desktop real estate. There's also the matter of arm and wrist angles; some have argued that even today's keyboards are too wide and that ergonomy would dictate a more compact board.

For me, it's also the matter of me wanting to be able to use any physical board I come across. As long as things can be done in software, I can normally get them working. A hardware solution isn't always accessible to me.

It's a tricky matter.