These proposals at least have the virtue of being easily understanadable. Getting familiar enough with either of them to use efficiently would take time, but at least you'd know where to look for the letters. That's the major downside to QWERTY (it's very arbitrary for most people) and the reason so few people are willing to switch to some other apparently-equally-arbitrary layout.

I can see how the approach here might not be that optimal in technical terms but I think there's huge value in its conceptual simplicity. I find it easy to imagine switching to it and getting up to decent speeds in a reasonably short timeframe, which is more than I can say for other layouts I've looked at over the years. Well done, both of you.