Five columns eh. What do your thumb keys do? Are you using home row mods?
This too is what I have found. The emacs.ch folks have been really nice to me, a new user, particularly Louis, the owner.
Mass-produced ergonomic keyboards are around $400 USD these days. The more of it you build yourself, the cheaper. I can build one for some $15, having already sunk the costs of a 3D printer, soldering station, some switches, some keycaps, a few Pro Micro boards, and lots of time learning about it.
But before my wrists started hurting, I never went for expensive nor weird keyboards. An IBM Model M passed into my life a long time ago, and quietly back out of it after only a few years, relatively unappreciated... Crazy, I know!
One of my thumb keys is Shift, and the opposite is Nav (arrows on one hand, mouse on the opposite). Last time I tried home row mods, a couple months ago, I caught up with what somebody said was the settings you really need for home row mods, and the misfiring problem I had before was much improved. But my fingers felt overworked, my thumbs felt underworked, and switching modifier keys when I needed to type a letter key on the other hand was work my brain isn't used to. For the same reason, I have not put 'e' on one of my thumbs as in the Maltron layout: thumbs for mods and space, fingers for letters.
Enter is a key I don't type nearly as often as space and backspace, so Enter goes on my little finger and the latter two are on my thumbs.
While I'm holding forth, homerow mods are certainly a thing on Colemak-DH (see Miryoku), but I think the better your home row is for typing letters, the worse it is for homerow mods. Letter/mod combos should go on less common letters.
modelfkeyboards.com is a thing, too. (I'm not a customer, nor associated with them.)
I'm all in on MX-style keyswitches, because you can make keywell keyboards such as the Dactyl Manuform with them. See for example [email protected]. Keywell keyboard design and manufacturing is... shall we say, much more decentralized than Model M keyboard design and manufacturing? :) Many people can make you a curvy keyboard, and there are many varieties, or you can make one yourself, and customize its form as you wish. But this is all far afield from what you actually want, I'm afraid.
Your question also brings to mind beamspring switches such as https://kono.store/blogs/keyboards/silo-beam. Similarly that does not appear to lead to the same kind of experience of clicking a button, paying your money, and getting a pre-existing keyboard removed from a warehouse shelf and shipped to you in a few days, as you would get with Unicomp.
Your reticence to wield sole power reassures me, and as a reddit user for 16 years, I support this decision you've "unilaterally" made.
The network effect is real, and centralized services are simpler to use than federated ones. But "vulnerability" is the right word for this centralization of content, and I'm glad to have moved here.
As a further fix to that vulnerability, #razit recommends replacing all comments and posts that one owns on Reddit with gibberish, because if we don't: (1) this repository of centralized content, and the votes indicating its quality, will be exploited for large language model training; and (2) if the content remains, future users will interact with it on Reddit, rather than finding another place, cementing the network effect.
I've already read exhortations, months ago, before this flap, to avoid handing one's quality content to a company like Reddit, and to post on one's own blog or somewhere similarly less-centralized. And the longer my posts, the more I've thought about that while writing them.
I don't see any tidy "export" function on Reddit, and I haven't been that active, so I doomscrolled my entire comment and post history, and downloaded it as a giant 4MB html file. (Users who have been more active on Reddit may not be able to do this.) I'll have to use BeautifulSoup to extract my comments out, but then I can post them on my blog or something.
While I don't see the large language model deal coming for Reddit, I didn't see GitHub Copilot coming either. I don't really like the idea of snubbing (both of the) real people who need to read what I wrote, just to stick it to companies monetizing the content I've given away; but if there is an archive for people to read, and language modellers have to crawl web pages like the rest of us instead of getting the refined data, that seems more egalitarian.