> Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys.

As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. It's like a novice golfer complaining that it hurts their hips when they rotate through the swing, or a tennis player complaining that trying to add spin with a wrist twist feels weird, or any millions of other example of "feels weird without practice". Hell, most people can't do the most basic of yoga poses without practice. Muscles need to be stretched and trained into doing what you want them to do. Once they are, all of the complaints go away and things feel normal.

Is QWERTY the most efficient, no. But as someone else commented, speed is not my issue. Thinking what needs to be typed is definitely my speed regulator. If I were to just do basic text dictation or re-typing while reading a direct source, my speeds increase dramatically.

I find that most typing complaints are from those that never had formal typing instruction and are self taught with games or similar. I was fortunate to have one full year of typing while in high school, and it is by far the most used class instruction I've ever had.

Nah dawg. I was a practiced touch typist for years. We had oodles of typing in elementary school. Pain in my pinkies didn't get better. Only worse because keys like {}| are far more important in programming than writing English and add to pinkie stress. Switching to a Kinesis Advantage with thumb keys and layers to put keys like {} under better fingers resolved my problem.