Your complain about w/b not laying on home row is just wrong, for example I do not use QWERTY at all and for me even h/j/k/l are not on the howe row and I still consider these commands ergonomical. Why? Because I use to touchtype.
> The Word/Backword menmonic isn't paired (that would be forward/backward)
What is paired is not a mnemonic but an action. If you start to understand that any command has a complementary command it makes your expectation from vi predictable. It happens in the following way: you learn how to do some moving you are needed, then you check the complementary action (there are 3 layers of complementarity in the word iteration problem: forward/backward, cursor on start/end and word/WORD), then you just make your muscle memory to learn what you saw, that's all!
> but more importantly, it makes as much sense as binding cursor keys to Left/Up/Down/Right So it fails your own "pairness" criterion in its most basic movement!
My thesis is that if the editor can move the cursor left then it must have an ability to move it right (and vice versa), if the editor can move the cursor upwards, then it must have an ability to move it downwards (and vice versa), nothing more. You are talking about some very specific ways to move cursor (there are plenty of them in vim to be honest) and BTW if you are comfortable with cursor keys, so why have you complained about w/b which are not laying on the home row? The home row story is about your hands laying on the keys with letters and controlling all 4 rows, not about your right hand laying on 4 keys and your left hand can not control anything except esc/meta/alt/ctrl/shift.
> Of course you have your own personalized definition! Why would you use that in a conversation with others, though, when they're more likely using a more common one?
Ergonomy is the Psychiatry domain, BTW we are not discussing ergonomic per se. We are discussion about achieving erconomic with only having some well-known instruments: keyboard, console software, display. Of course your definition of ergonomic (which you did not worked to write down here) is about wearing a hat which just reads your thoughts and outputs the correct result, but I tell you about some ways of achieving ergonomics on the hardware you obviously have, I don't tell about dreams of perfect world.
> it doesn't do its one thing "well", so as expected, you can't paper unergonomics over with some "philosophy"!
I promise I do not lie, I am teaching some people offline to touchtype and to use vi(m), but I can not teach you if you don't even ask questions. I write this comment because I work on a book about vi for noobs and I will never get tired to introduce people to see some ergonomics in the things I love which seems obscure to them. For example, if you didn't fire a single bullet you will never see what firearm products are ergonomic and what are not. If you didn't fire a single bullet towards the real enemy you can consider AR (full of bells and whistles) as ergonomical, while in reality what is ergonomical is AK (doesn't jam under the rain, doesn't afraid of the mud, allows to fire knippels against the drones instead of regular bullets). If you have never danced Salsa, you will never understand how the lead is leading and why the follower follows.
PS. Sorry for my bad English, this is not my native language and I am too lazy to polish my grammar with some modern tools. Sometimes I might misunderstand you or write down not what I really think.