Ergonomics/avoiding RSI

Less moving your fingers back and forth. Dvorak keeps most of your keystrokes on the home row - and almost none on the bottom row which is the most straining to reach.

Do you not understand how speed can increase because your fingers do not have to travel so far?

That has been my experience, yes. (I also can type longer without fatigue.) But, I've read about most of the studies having a bias from Dvorak himself - have any modern trials supported his findings?

Typing English.
The entire thing falls apart when you realise a console autist is not typing english.

I don't understand why anyone would care about bias when the logic is perfectly sound. It is an undisputed fact that your fingers travel a shorter distance and also reduces the stress of typing when compared to QWERTY and while typing in English. You can certainly do a modern trial but it's completely unnecessary when the previous facts are hard facts.

Most commands are english words or parts of them. And even when typing in a different language, the relative letter frequencies are usually not that different.

I prefer QWERTY on my desktop and Dvorak on my phone. I did give Dvorak a try for around a month on my desktop, but for reasons like it being annoying to type with one hand I decided to switch back.

You're right. Funny thing is, I recently had an argument like this in an IRC chatroom. He kept telling me that visceral experience means nothing - he thought I was adding two plus two and getting five when I told him about the benefits.

Every time I've checked a programming language outside of like etaoins there's immediately a bunch of symbols _-+*=/>

Well guess what. Dvorak has a bunch of common symbols easily accessible on the top row, instead of being all cramped under the right pinky like in QWERTY. There's also the Programmer's Dvorak variant which keeps the letter positions of normal Dvorak, but rearranges the symbols to optimise for the ones most commonly used in programming languages (instead of natural languages like normal Dvorak).