I kind of wonder if some layout that mimics wasd but uses the thumb buttons to indicate which “row” you are in could be intuitive to people who learned to type conventionally. (The intuition here being that most of us aren’t going to become keyer experts).
For a time I made the mappings a little more memorable by forcing two related keys (like a and ą or o and ó) to have their chords differ in just one finger position - and that did work but it lowered the "efficiency estamates" of the generated layouts. In the end I reserved one thumb position for my custom shortcuts and allowed the optimizer to go crazy with all the remaining chords. After playing with both styles I prefer the latter. Entering text feels more a little fast-paced maze solving game where you have to figure out which fingers to move to transition between chords.
What a cool project. I grew up playing with modeling clay, but never did anything with those skills. It is fascinating to see them used in something useful like this.
Maybe a scanner of some sort is needed, to share 3D printable versions of clay objects, haha.