I also think that the keyboard was likely designed to be familiar to those comfortable with the standardized keyboard layout, as opposed to being efficient.

From an efficiency perspective, there's a lot that you can improve on, both in the general case (layout for English typing) and in the special case of Lisp programming - but I don't think that was their goal.

I wouldn't buy one of these myself, but I can understand why someone else would.

As a software hack, there's always Shift Parentheses[1].

[1] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#s17...