I've never involved myself in debates about the QWERTY keyboard versus alternatives. I will say, though, that it would be better to have "t" further away from "w". On a different line, maybe? This arrangement makes the typing of "not" for "now" or vice versa all too easy, I'm guessing that is the reason that Thomas Paine wrote "Now is the time for all good men...." In a first draft he surely wrote "It is now the time..." only to start worrying that some middleman would turn that accidentally into "It is not the time." "Not is the time for all good men..." seems more nonsensical than "It is not the time" so the latter would be more likely to survive as a typo than the former. And of course the now/not reversal is worse than nonsensical. It produces a sensible sentence with a meaning exactly the opposite of what is intended.
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I've recently read and reviewed a book from Princeton University Press entitled HOW GLOBAL CURRENCIES WORK, by Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehlm and Livia Chitu. Two of those authors are affiliated with the European Central Bank. I won't discuss here the main thesis of the book, which I summarized with my usual panache in my review for AllAboutAlpha. Instead, I'll take up a subsidiary point: the role of the Japanese yen on the world scene. There was a time when Japan was seen as the rising economic superpower. If through the 1970s and 1980s, a random individual of average intelligence and just slightly above average interest in following the world's financial news had been asked, "Is the US dollar going to remain the world's central currency for a long time yet and, if not, what might be its replacement?" that person's answer might well have been, "no it won't, and the yen will replace it." But the yen didn't. Nowadays it is ...