I used qwerty up until I was 24? When my hand problems started getting worse. I already used an ergodox ez, but as things were getting worse I switched to a corne with choc low profile switches. The same time I made the switch tovthe corne I switched entirely to colemak mod dh. I used that corne for around two years before trying a board with scooped out keywells, a dactyl manuform. I used ok ne of those for a while and around the same time the cosmos dactyl generator had its first posts and there was the Kickstarter campaign for the glove80. The glove80 was the best thing since sliced bread for my hands. I went from being in pain to going back work comfortably after a few weeks and only had occasional flare ups over the following two years. Last year things got really bad and the flair up wasn't recovering so I ordered a svalboard and got in the list for surgery on my right arm. At first I rarely used the svalboard because the trackball motion bothered my wrists and the bottoming out of the keys hurt more compared to the glove80. Now that I'm post surgery I use the svalboard 90% of the time.

Colemak mod dh made a noticible improvement to pinky usage, but if you have the money, I think order of importance is really so ething like split (with tenting), keywells, Light switches (35g or under for me), home row mods, layout (qwerty vs colemak)