DE shift+8/9 is only slightly worse than US shift+9/0 for parens. Brackets+Braces are the real problem on DE layout. I switched between US (programming) and DE (writing German) for a couple years; but then ended up using US-intl-no-dead-keys everywhere because the constant switching of input methods was annoying (especially due to Y/Z being swapped on DE, which causes confusion between undo/redo).