I use a Keychron Q11, a split row staggered keyboard. On the laptop, I use Kmonad on linux with home row mods but I think I will switch to Kanata because it seems more compatible with Windows (work OS). I have been using home row mods for a few days now and I feel that it has greatly alleviated the pain I have on the left pinky finger (remapping caps lock to control and using Emacs keybindings for years did that I think). I am tempted to switch to a columnar staggered keyboard, specifically ZSA's voyager, but I don't know if I will adapt to the layout. Maybe someone with more experience can give advice here...
I tried to change the keyboard layout to a more "ergonomic" layout (optimot), but after months of training, I could never gain the proficiency I have in AZERTY. I think it's not worth it to switch.
I have both an Ergodox and a Ferris which are both now gathering dust. In my experience, columnar layouts are not worth it for me as a developer, because there is nothing that I can gain from a layout that changes the position of the {};'<>() keys that will ever offset the productivity and familiarity lost by those keys never being where I expect them to be.
Designing a symbol specific layer[1] that includes all the symbols without needing to shift the keys made programming much more pleasant for me. It took a bit of getting used to but since programming and typing symbols is something we do quite frequently during the day, the brain gets used to it rather quickly.
I have a bunch of home row mods, and I also have layers with dedicated app-specific utility-mappings that I have automatically toggle on when the relevant app window is focused so that I don't have to waste extra keys to toggle/switch between different layers.
I tried to change the keyboard layout to a more "ergonomic" layout (optimot), but after months of training, I could never gain the proficiency I have in AZERTY. I think it's not worth it to switch.