Words are inadequate

I'm familiar with the history of QWERTY, thanks. As for the complaint about the location of the CTRL key, that was half in jest (though now that I'm at home I note that my current laptop has CTRL and Fn in reverse order from the Apple standard, which seems more sensible to me). And I certainly believe that it's easier to type nonstandard American English characters in a system where that was part of the design[1].

I stand by my assertions that a) making Home/End going to top/bottom of document and b) removing useful keys from the 104-key layout were objectively stupid design choices. Home/End I've ranted about above; as for useful keys, there's plenty of keys in the 104-key that were worth removing or combining. Trashing all of the document editing box (Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn) was a step too far. [Insert, I admit, is worthless. The rest are necessary.] Especially if you're going to continue to let CAPSLOCK take up twice the space of a normal key, and leave /both/ SHIFTs at three times normal.

[1] Neat tip that you may or not already know: in some Microsoft applications, like Word or Office, you can get there by hitting CTRL+modifier before the letter, so CTRL+: then e gets you ë. Which is of no help in most of the things one does, and is also kind of awkward, I know.