Thanks for your thoughts. I use FUTO voice usually, but there are situations where typing out a short message is better -- eg, in a restaurant or doctor's office or someplace where voice input might bother other people.

I've found graphene's keyboard far more error-prone than the stock android keyboard, but I also don't care to learn swipe to type.

The feature I'm missing is simply that rubbing my finger left or right on the spacebar in text mode causes the cursor insertion point to move left or right on in the text I'm entering. It makes it sooo much easier to correct typos.

FUTO and GBoard has the feature you're describing and I use it all the time. Pretty much anything you miss from Pixel UI can be attained by simply installing Google's app from the playstore.