The large keys are really stupid, IMO. Stabilizers add complexity and never quite work perfectly. Keys would be just as easy to hit if they were limited to a maximum of 1.5 units.
The only real advantage to having the larger keys is to fill in the gaps and try to hide how unbalanced and terrible the standard keyboard layout is. If you use smaller keys and get rid of totally useless or ancillary ones, the asymmetry and completely arbitrary design of the standard layout becomes more glaringly obvious:
Instead, you should try to switch to a keyboard with split halves, sufficient tenting, some rotation, and a slight negative tilt so that wrists can stay in a neutral position. Both halves should be symmetrical, with the keys laid out along columns for each finger, and no more keys than necessary. The thumbs should be properly taken advantage of (1 common key for the two most powerful fingers to share is tremendously stupid). In general, keys should be placed and oriented so they take minimal movement to reach, and use the strongest finger muscles to press.
I suspect there may be some advantage to having at least one thumb key one each hand which is larger than 1x1 or 1x1.5 units. (For instance, Matias’s new 2.5x1.5 split spacebar keys for their ErgoPro keyboard might be nice.) But it’s probably not strictly necessary to have any keys larger than 1x1.
Hypersphere wrote: ↑There are keyboards that have 1x shift keys, which some people are able to tolerate, but I find too small. On the other hand, I find the 2.75x Right Shift on most ANSI keyboards an unnecessary waste of space just to fill out that row of keys. Far better to reduce the size of the Right Shift and add a 1x Fn key to its right -- this is done on the HHKB Pro 2, for example.
The problem with the standard right shift key is not the size, but the stupidly long distance away from the "home" finger position. On early typewriters both shift keys were circles, and pretty easy to access, but as extra punctuation/symbol keys got added on the right, the right shift key got pushed away, so that it’s much harder to reach than the left shift key, especially for people with small hands (more generally, the right pinky is dramatically overloaded, and many keys on the right – including return, delete/backspace, backslash, minus, and equals – are further away than they should be). One of the very bad design changes of the ISO layout (not sure who first came up with it, maybe terminal IBM boards?) is moving the left shift key to the left so that it’s just as hard to reach as the right shift.
There’s nothing inherently hard about using a 1x1 shift key, if it’s put in a more convenient location. For instance, if you made the caps lock and apostrophe keys into shift keys, or put shift keys directly below the spacebar in easy access of the thumbs, they would be quite easy to use, even at a 1x1 size.
For instance, this layout leaves enough of the standard design in place to be pretty easy to learn, but the changed positions of shift, delete/backspace, backslash, and the various modifier keys should make it much more comfortable to reach all the keys:
Of course you can always try something more radical: