I'm perfectly willing to make people learn all sorts of new things :-). We focused on optimizing over the permutations of the key labels in this analysis but we designed dodona [1] to be much more flexible. To demonstrate this, I just threw together a quick little notebook [2] evaluating the average distance traveled for FITALY. As you'd expect, it's much shorter than what we find using a random configuration. We'd love it if people used dodona to explore things more creative than permuting keys.

[1] https://github.com/sangaline/dodona/

[2] http://sangaline.com/blog/optimizing_for_swype/FITALY.html