Memes

I've used Dvorak for years now (15 or so?). I find it far more comfortable for typing in English than qwerty. You don't have to reach as much to type common words because all the common letters are on home row. The less common a character, the farther it is from comfortable use. And it has a nice bouncy feeling because you often switch hands after one or two key strokes. When I have to use qwerty, I find it very uncomfortable to have to "spider" around with one hand for clusters of letters as I type.

Now, the REAL downside of Dvorak in my opinion is that every shortcut, hotkey, and keybinding in the universe is designed for QWERTY layout. Playing a new game? Don't forget to re-map every key except M and A! Careful not to miss any! Game doesn't let you map a key to "comma"? Looks like you have to switch to QWERTY to play this game (and type in chat with it blegh)! Re-mapping is a huge pain and all the convenience of learning something like Vim is overshadowed by the keys getting scattered all over the place. I'm fine living with an awkward CTRL-C and CTRL-V, but for most people I can see why they wouldn't bother.

tl;dr: DVORAK > QWERTY for typing in English, but it comes with annoying drawbacks