I was in the same boat, the solution to my predicament came in the form of my friend, who is a keyboard geek and has a few tens of them. He lent me one, I liked

I was in the same boat, the solution to my predicament came in the form of my friend, who is a keyboard geek and has a few tens of them. He lent me one, I liked it and bought it from him. I greatly enjoy it now and would not go back to a non-QMK keyboard (or a non-split one), though I wouldn't have gone for a columnar keyboard if I knew. I would also have preserved the full layout, to prevent having to needlessly retrain some muscle memory, but being able to do things like remap "Tab+hjkl" to "{}[]" is fantastic. I should actually finish writing up that post I started writing in December...