Jimi Hendrix. Elton John. David Bowie. The list goes on.
Just because you are happy with an arbitrary barrier to entry does not mean that everyone around you must be.
Music is a wonderful thing. Anyone can learn to make it. Telling someone they need to learn their scales first is just condescending.
> As efficient as theoretically possible, ever, for the rest of time? Probably not. As efficient as is practicable by today's professional musicians? Yes for sure.
> But improvements are always welcome.
Hah. You have already proved this statement wrong. You do not welcome changes. You approach the very idea of progress with condescending skepticism.
Need more examples? How about the article we are discussing? The fact is that it is prohibitively difficult to market a piano with slightly smaller keys. Getting something like the Janko keyboard to get traction in this industry is practically impossible, and not because Janko's design lacks merit.
Look: Nowhere did I say that musicians shouldn't learn scales. That's absurd. Neither did I complain that, "I don't want to learn scales, because it's too hard." On the contrary, I have learned scales. I have been playing music since childhood, and am quite proficient.
My point is that learning scales is arbitrarily difficult, by nature of the way we write them and talk about them. We have Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. We call Ionian "Major", and Aeolian "Minor". When we write anything that isn't Ionian, we use "accidentals". It's a mess. We can do better. We can make learning scales a simpler process. We can make better abstractions for them, which will make it easier to talk about more complicated theory.
Instead, people like you insist we all stick with 17th century western notation for eternity, because that's what we've got, and it's good enough. People like you insist that new players must be motivated to learn overtly unnecessary skills, for no reason other than "that's how piano keyboards are shaped". In doing so, you turn away intelligent people who are more interested in music than slogging through the centuries of cruft that traditional western music theory is made of.