For Rulemak, I decided to give each Russian Cyrillic characters its own key (not through AltGr).  I thought about adding other Cyrillic characters (Ukrainian, ...) but I have no need for those myself and had no idea about letter frequencies etc.

To accomodate typing short pieces of Latin text (eg. URL's, e-mail addresses) without switching layouts, I mapped original (Latin) Colemak to the AltGr plane, as well as missing punctuation characters.  Thinking about that now, layout "shifting" (rather than switching) in X11 could easily be done with a dedicated key (eg. Menu), saving AltGr for other combinations.  Maybe I should still put non-Russian characters there.  Even Russians may need them sometimes, eg. to type foreign names?

PS: And Rulemak has «№» on Shift-3 like native Russian typewriters! :-)

My Russian Colemak has the letters arranged in a way that i personally (and probably most english-speaking folks) find more logical. eg в /v/ is on the colemak v position, whereas Rulemak has ж /ʒ/ on the colemak v position, moving в /v/ to colemak w. I suppose it's based on a difference in transcription, in German or Dutch в /v/ would be transcribed as w. Then, for my part, i put ш /ʃ/ onto Colemak w, merely for the visual resemblance. Nonetheless, the entire home row is identical between the two layouts, which is a coincidence as i didn't see Rulemak until after i had finished making my Russian Colemak.

Russian Colemak (what a wicked name!) has kept the alt mappings for keys the same as in Colemak, provided that the key is not occupied by a Cyrillic letter in the base layout, conserving € and ¢, although i have to say that i'd be more than surprised if you honestly need ¡ or ª in Russian. Hmm, maybe i will map "LAЦИСН ИЦСLEАЯ МISSILЕ" to one of the alt functions ... Gosh, i'm a nörd.

Yeah, also i think it's quite useful to have some other Cyrillic letters mapped to the alt key because it lets you type other languages that use a wider array of Cyrillic letters. In case i ever want to learn Ukrainian.

Jeez, you're so right.

It's not a US QWERTY perspective, it's an annoyance at the plethora of national layouts. I've abandoned my own country's layout (Norwegian) and I don't miss it.

The thing is, punctuation that used to sit around not doing a lot has been put to good use by code makers. So to code successfully you'll want, say, the dollar sign to be somewhere reachable. Not on an AltGr mapping of an obscure key. And you'll want the accents to be reachable even as non-deadkeys.

This may be a moot point for Cyrillic as you say, but the point of international compliance is not. Maybe pride precludes making the 'US' layout a standard, but it is the de facto damn-closest-thing-to-a-standard-there-is and it's fine (enough for me at least). Don't kick it because it started in the US - that'd be like refusing to learn latin in the middle ages because you didn't like Italians. Meh.

But your points are valid too. It comes down to preference I guess.

It feels a bit harder unless you happen to use one of those boards that sport a really long space bar in which case it's a lot harder, but another problem is its implementation. Sometimes it doesn't play well with scripted input boxes (can't remember whether it's usually java or flash or something else but it's too frequent). Not being able to input an email address in such a box because the implementer didn't consider that your @ symbol might be AltGr-mapped is a pain.