Ironically, speaking as an Amiga guy, those diagonal function keys were an aspect of the ST I really liked!

I don't know if they were consistent with the other keys in terms of feel, but they were a striking, unique design feature that instantly identified the machine as being Atari without compromising practicality.

Yeah, I forgot about that. But I suppose you didn't need to replug them very often, and it wasn't much worse than plugging into an IBM PC before USB came along. And at least the Atari had lots of useful ports.

Mouse cables and ports routinely broke on those machines because of the poor design.

I guess the idea was to have a clean design with cables out of the way, but it really was a bad place for them.