APT VS engrammer

I've considered both the earlier version of APT, as well as Engram, with these layouts putting punctuation on the center index columns.

APT

Apt: https://github.com/apsu/apt

It's a rather bad layout by current measures. Not a lot better than QWERTY, and barely better than std Norman, much worse than Workman, Dvorak, Halmak, Engram, Colemak, Semimak, ISRT, RSTDH, MTGAP, APT, Poqtea, Hands Down, and many, many others. Even the simple Notarise is much better (with similar distance stats), and is much easier to learn coming from QWERTY.

Or u/apsuity's Apt v3

I don't have any personal experience with anything except Colemak-DH so I can't offer recommendations based on personal experience. With that being said, if I was to try a new layout I'd likely choose APTv3 or some variation of Hands Down as I hear good things about both.

It's the L placement and left index _mostly. Right hand is a bit overloaded as well however, like rnv on ring and the f placement, never on dvorak despite being full alt is not fun lol. That is not to speak for all sfbs on right hand like rn, sl, ct and gh which are bearable to slide on a low profile keyboard but hard to deal with on anything else. It also creates annoying patters like ght and wr because it puts everything on this hand. Left index is all of that, squared. You can deal with it just like you can deal with qwerty's jank, but there's just many better options out there. You could for example take a look at apt

nah colemak is good, dvorak is pretty garbage. If you wanna try something with a similar feel that's really good maybe try APT. Instead of that you can maybe also try some colemak mods like Colemak DH or rollmak: q w f p b z l u o y c r s t g m n e a i ' x v d k j h ; , .

The balance emerged over time through experimentation and real-world use (i.e. it wasn't necessarily a formal design goal that I set out with) but it appears to do quite well if we consider the various measures of symbol frequencies in programming along with the fact that ,.-; are centrally located in my base layer's Engrammer layout for convenient access.

Have you considered Arno's Engram 2.0 layout or my programmer-friendly variant thereof? Arno Klein used Colemak for 10 years before inventing Engram. Check out the "Why a new key layout?" section for his rationale & motivation that led him to venture beyond Colemak, as well as the design philosophy that sets Engram apart from other layouts. His experience might best answer your question since he has used both layouts.

See my Engram 2.0 review as well as my programmer-friendly adaptation for details.

Author's note: * Source: Vial/QMK * Keyboard: Remnant * Layout: Engrammer

On leaving QWERTY, you might also consider Arno's Engram 2.0 layout, which places all punctuation in the central columns so that your 8 touch typing fingers go straight up and down, effectively staying in their columns all the time. I've used Engram exclusively since the past 2 years (after 6 months of BEAKL-15, 16 years of Dvorak, and 6 years of QWERTY) and I've written about my experience with it here. Moreover, if you prefer standard shifted pairs (e.g. so quotes don't shift into parentheses), I've created a programmer-friendly variant called the "Engrammer" layout that helps maintain cross-proficiency with standard keyboards.

So far I've done some research and have particularly liked Arno's Engram and Halmak. As good as both of those are, they are not popular at all, especially compared to Colemak (normal or DH), but are some of the best. I do not mind the number keys (and the symbols on them) of QWERTY so I'd like to retain that, but I have played around on keyboard editors for a bit and am confident that I can customise a layout to retain that pretty easily (somewhat like Engrammer).