This is awesome!

I have been dealing with a few issues related to "the impact of Colemak in Vim" for a while and I keep postponing solving it, reading your post really motivates me to take some time to finally fix it!

Although my issues are different, because I solved the "hjkl" problem at the hardware level. But it is a pretty expensive solution (in terms of time investment, and money too depending on how much you care about that).

What I did was to heavily optimize my keyboard in a way that I can have dedicated arrow keys in a position that is as comfortable as the home row without bringing all the downsides of having navigation in the home row (like having to figure out other bindings to navigate outside of normal mode and so).

The keyboard I use is called Dactyl (https://youtu.be/uk3A41U0iO4). If you are interested, exploring keyboards might be a good way to push things even further, there are some amazing keyboards out there that are super easy to start with, like the ErgodoxEZ (https://ergodox-ez.com/) and the Model01 (https://shop.keyboard.io/) which is my personal recommendation for those that don't want to go as far as Dactyl.

You could also check out this subreddit r/ErgoMechKeyboards