My own experiments with this point to similar conclusions. QWERTY is not laid out that badly, really, and for me (with no RSI problems, yet) the benefits of using the default, especially being able to type on other people's computers, far outweighed any benefit from the alternate layout (Workman). However, the excursion was completely worth it for me - I switched in the first place because I never learned to touch type properly, and figured it would be easier and more fun to learn from scratch on a new layout. That was true, and soon I found I'd entirely forgotten QWERTY, so I re-learned that from scratch, touch-typing, and am about as fast and accurate as I was on the alternate layout. Blog post after all that: https://patricksanan.org/personal/adventures-in-keyboarding-...
The fourth and fifth-least frequent English letters have the first and second-best location on the right hand, and a rarely-used symbol (;) has another.
Of the most frequent letters (ETAOIN), only one (A) is directly under a fingertip at a resting position, and two of them require the longest stretches (T, N).
Dvorak, by comparison, puts the least frequent letters on the bottom row: ;QJKX BMWVZ (PYGF are less frequent than M and W). It has all of ETAOIN on the middle row.
