One issue I've always had with QWERTY (and probably this new layout as well) is that "similar" letters are often next to each other on the keyboard, making typo

One issue I've always had with QWERTY (and probably this new layout as well) is that "similar" letters are often next to each other on the keyboard, making typo detection nearly impossible in English. For instance, in English, many short words with a "i" as the only vowel remain a valid word when the "i" is replaced by an "o" or a "u" -- pit/pot/put, bit/bot/but, tip/top/tup, pig/pog/pug, bitch/butch/botch, etc. This means if you go to hit the "i" key but accidentally hit the "u" or "o" keys, the typo won't necessarily look like a typo to either to the author or the reader. Similarly with "s" and "d" -- pretty much every verb can be conjugated to end with either an "s" or a "d", so if you press "d" when you meant to press "s" or vice versa, it probably remains a valid verb, and thus is harder to catch. For these purposes, my ideal layout would have interchangeable letters sufficiently far apart from each other to make typo detection+resolution easier. The most commonly used letters should be surrounded by the least commonly used letters so that, for instance, if you "jqb" I know you meant "job" and not, say, "jib". This would also make swipe typing on phones far easier to use, as it would be much less ambiguous which letters you were aiming for.