disordered

I don't agree with your premise that chess has evolved to be at the pinnacle of its niche (I don't know enough about Go to comment on it). There are a number of interesting variations in chess-like games that, while maintaining the general theme of killing the enemy king, offer aspects of gameplay that chess does not.

Two of the more well known variations are shōgi and xiangqi: Shōgi allows the redeployment of captured pieces, whilst xiangqi limits the movement of a few pieces and has a mechanism for representing artillery. I find that each game has a very different character to that of western chess, even despite the fact that they share a large number of tactical motifs.

Western chess may be the most popular variant world-wide, but that's no indication that it is at any kind of pinnacle.

I've permanently remapped my CTRL key to my Caps-Lock key. Not only does it prevent GNU Emacs from giving me carpal tunnel syndrome, but I find that the numerous keyboard shortcuts that use the CTRL key quickly become second nature when the CTRL key is easier in reach.