> Sad thing is, that if someone would spend a ton of research and thinking on making something usable and comfortable, most people would completely poopoo it as a freaky unusable layout, just because it would look unfamiliar, lol.

Absolutely. 8-Pen was this for Android. (example video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo)

It was absolutely, hands down without question, the most accurate way to quickly enter text into a phone using only a screen. Seriously - I could type at about 25-35 wpm on my phone screen at 100% accuracy, one handed.

They'd done a ton of work to place letters based on frequency and likely combinations to make typing smooth and relatively fast.

No fucking disaster of auto-complete that I have to click to get the word I want, or when you actually have a vocabulary larger than 150 words, but auto-complete is fucking dumb and always picks the most basic option from the path, or when the word you want isn't in the phone dictionary, no hiccups if you want to misssspell something for impact. It was genuinely just the best keyboard I have EVER used on a phone.

The downside? It takes about 3 weeks of practice to actually learn, and most people just refuse to try for longer than 10 seconds.

I still find it incredibly frustrating that qwerty, of all god-damned things, is the input formula we've picked for phones. It's fucking dumb.