Insane.  The home rows are a key too wide.  A qwerty touch typist never needs to move a finger more than one key left or right from its resting position (try this -- it hurts!).  This layout forces you to do so regularly to hit either control/shift modifiers or the cursor controls and/or backspace in the middle (gack: imagine having to <i>move your wrist</i> just to backspace over the "S" you just typed!).<p>Traditional layout may have its bugs, but that doesn't mean that anything novel is better.