cal, i love your work but please reevaluate the ticketing systems that you recommend; ticketing makes things fall through cracks because the nature of the incentives for the participants in the ticketing process all drive that way
re: backspace etc. i've recently used dvorak+karabiner+goku on a mac to make homerow mod keys, based on gabriel-gardner's template. others have used QMK keyboards, or kmonad etc. on linux and windows
Sure, all good ideas in the meantime (and you could use right-thumb cmd/alt modifier or holdSpace as a vim-like cursor mod with the home keys as cursor and with H as backspace and G and delete and I as Enter to free your pinky (qwerty-layout))
But then dvorak is obviously not the best layout for this since it wasn't designed with all of that in mind. And neither were the home row mods themselves, for example, maybe only Shift is useful in the home row, and the others aren't used frequently enough (or maybe it's better to have numpad-mod key on the home row instead of the Windows key).
So I guess the focus of the layout collaboration effort could be on improving the algo/data, but instead we get a bunch of new layouts that only tackle a small(er)(and different) part of the problem without much of an improvement over he previous solutions (and, more importantly, with no good way to compare them). That would only leave you with the black magic of tweaking algo weights in the end :-)
P.S.
There is also https://github.com/jtroo/kanata alternative to kmonad
And re. homerow mod keys, it seems that there is an even better approach not relying on timings (which I think are impossible to resolve with full accuracy, though with per-key timings you can get pretty close), but that's not implementable within Karabiner, so someone had a homebrew Swift solution I haven't tried
there's an active community and people use it in very different ways