That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it.
My hands never hurt, even though I love writing long texts, long emails, long code comments, etc. I can also do 120 wpm but I don't feel the need to do it because it's stressful, not necessarily on the hands, but on my thought process. Speed isn't an issue.
If Dvorak solved your RSI, that's awesome, I can understand why you switched, however I don't think this is a causality issue, meaning that I don't think it was Qwerty that caused RSI in the first place. If Dvorak is a good strategy for you to manage the pain, then great, but it's pain management, not a cure.
I also used to configure my machines a lot, going into a yak shaving rabbit hole every time it wasn't functioning properly. I was on Linux back then, but I gave it up and nowadays I'm much happier. The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.
I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand work means less pain, so maybe you're right, maybe it's just a coincidence.
Or maybe less finger distance means less work which means less tension accumulated in the muscles and then indeed less pain.
Nonetheless, I changed "fixed my RSI" by "fixed my RSI problems" thanks to your feedback, which should clear out the misunderstanding.
I'm a long time Vim user, myself (and no, not looking to spark a holy war here). One observation I have about my own habits is that I subconsciously slap the ESC key every time I'm done with something, even if I'm in a non-modal editor like Notepad or SQL Management studio. It's just become so ingrained in me that I can't stop doing it. Mostly because there's no negative feedback loop associated with doing it.
But I just aliased `us` and `dv` to setxkbmap shortcuts, so thanks for that!
(That said, I still use Colemak because it happens to work better for my native tongue. If I only wrote English, I would have been a Dvorak user.)
Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row.
You can spot a Dvorak user by just watching them type: their fingers walk a lot less distance than other users. It's a trick that I learned from other Dvorak users who had spotted me.
I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes.
I type around 145 wpm, including in the 3 languages I speak (all ASCII based though) and languages or frameworks that I know by hearth.
To make it easy for colleges and friends, I just have 2 aliases:
alias aoeu="setxkbmap fr"
alias qsdf="setxkbmap -I ~/.xkb code -print | xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb - $DISPLAY"
As you can see, the four letters of the how row, in dvorak switches to french, in french switches to dvorak. Of course it could be more complicated with more layouts if I had to support them but then I guess a systray icon would work.
Anyway, also using Kinesis Advantage 2 LF, absolutely love it, and plenty of other "non-standard" stuff like the OP says, such as a tiling window manager.
Highly recommend learning or making a better layout than Qwerty because the drawbacks are largely country balanced by the benefits IMHO.
It's not about whatever someone thinks is "standard" it's about how you want to touch the machine for the rest of your life.