How about a little historical reminder? When people were looking for
Emacs on small machines like DOS, Coherent, Atari ST, and QNX,
MicroEmacs was the most widely used and accepted alternative.
MicroEmacs eventually lost a large number of users to MicroGNUEmacs
and Elle, at least partly because the MicroEmacs developers kept
diddling with the keyboard layout. I finally threw out MicroEmacs
when it became impossible to reconfigure MicroEmacs to the old
familiar layout.
The lesson, don't diddle with the default keyboard behaviour,
especially not in such a way as to make it difficult for people to get
the old familiar behaviour.