Please send help. I'm falling down the rabbit hole
This is very quickly becoming a very expensive hobby...
Bottom is my first, a GMMK Pro with Gateron ink black V2 switches. And just yesterday I received the Keychron Q5 Pro with Keychron's own banana switches that I'll be using at work
too late. I went from 100% to 75% to 60% to 75% to HHKB back to my 75% (mostly because I wanted to start using my Gat pro reds again) and now I’m using an Ortho Split with columnar stagger (a choc Sofle). What a wild journey it’s been.
Homerow mods are hard to zero in on but if you can get used to it, it's really nice. I get misfires but it's not that often. An alternative to HRM is One Shot Mods. I've seen it around but haven't used it much but the idea is that a key like Shift would get buffered and then attached to the next keystroke, so fer example, tap Shift and then release and tap a for a capital A. Some people swear by it. I personally just stuck with HRM. having Ctrl and Shift in homerow, under my fingers and saving pinky strain has bee amazing.
For the database like, check out bsag, kkga, and callum for some other tiny board layouts. There is a lot of smart stuff in there. Hypership is one I keep looking at and can be found here: https://keebogram.pages.dev/hypership/
For something not Colemak, look into Workman, Canary, and Hands Down. They take Colemak's ideas and seem to try and fix the trouble spots. For example, Canary takes the last remaining lesser used pinky keys and moves them to the inner lateral column for index finger. I really wish I had the time to learn Canary because I think it's probably as close to a good layout that typing in English can probably be made. Colemak does a lot of good but it benefits from still having quite a few keys where they are in QWERTY so it's easier to pick up.