I struggled with the Moonlander although it is a wonderful keyboard.
I mapped it to a Colemak layout varient when I first got it. I was constantly discovering key combos that didn't quite work for whatever reason and made tweaks to the layout or the shortcuts in various editors. Forever tying my brain in knots learning and relearning mappings and combos. Then I'd frequently jump on other peoples computers/laptops to help out with small things and have to switch back to the old mode of thinking.
It ended up being a productivity sink rather than a boon. I don't know whether I would have crossed some inflection point if I had persevered, but there was always this fixed cost of tweaking shortcuts when using new software that was more burdensome than with a plain qwerty keyboard.
Maybe I was too ambitious and should have avoided the Colemak-esque layout, but I haven't managed to summon the stamina to give it a fair go again. I still use one half of it for gaming though. It's really sweet for that.
I found I couldn't get colemak to work for me. Like you said, too many key combos that just felt awkward. I wound up using a layout[1] called "middlemak" that feels much more comfortable to me, and preserves a lot of qwerty hand if not actual key positions, which helped in the initial switch. Took me a few months to get up to a relatively normal typing speed and a year in (of maybe 2-4 days of use a week depending on whether I'm working from the road or not) and I still have to look at my keys about 50% of the time, but it's improving and since I only customized this one keyboard, it doesn't seem to have broken my muscle memory for a standard qwerty keyboard.
I'd say it's definitely the colemak change. They keyboard by itself takes some getting used to, a new layout on top would be overwhelming.
I kept mine pretty close to a standard qwerty - the only customizations are where I put the "\|", backspace, dash and a few other keys, along with what to do with all the thumb keys. Even with these relatively minor changes, it still took me about a week to recover my WPM, and I had to use their touch typing software to practice for an hour or two. Making only a few changes also makes it seamless to switch to laptop keyboards, etc.
This matches my experience exactly. I use a standard QWERTY setup on the moonlander, with only changes being the thumb clusters and changing caps lock to backspace. After a few days of practicing, it feels natural and seamless to switch back and forth.
I mapped it to a Colemak layout varient when I first got it. I was constantly discovering key combos that didn't quite work for whatever reason and made tweaks to the layout or the shortcuts in various editors. Forever tying my brain in knots learning and relearning mappings and combos. Then I'd frequently jump on other peoples computers/laptops to help out with small things and have to switch back to the old mode of thinking.
It ended up being a productivity sink rather than a boon. I don't know whether I would have crossed some inflection point if I had persevered, but there was always this fixed cost of tweaking shortcuts when using new software that was more burdensome than with a plain qwerty keyboard.
Maybe I was too ambitious and should have avoided the Colemak-esque layout, but I haven't managed to summon the stamina to give it a fair go again. I still use one half of it for gaming though. It's really sweet for that.