If you think it's ergonomic to move your entire hand away from the letters to press a frequently used key, well... I guess now I understand why Odin's creator disagrees with you about keyboard layouts! ^_^
Funny you should say that. I don't find it painful at all, I prefer the explicitness. I just wanted to relay my experience without unnecessarily bundling my opinion, since this is a thread about Odin after all.
Odin uses curly braces which (in QWERTY) are shifted and typed with your pinky—the worst possible combination. Are there layouts where ^ is worse than that?
I evaluated both some time ago. The standout difference for me was Zig requires you initialize all variables and struct fields explicitly, but Odin implicitly initializes variables and forgotten struct fields to their "zero value" (0/null).