Key arpeggios versus key chords

It is my strong opinion that arpeggiated key bindings – key bindings where you press multiple single, un-modified keys in a sequence, as you would in things like Emacs god-mode or Vim – are vastly superior, ergonomically, to key chords – like you would use in traditional GUI applications, or in vanilla Emacs. This is for a few reasons.

1. Having to hold a key down for an extended period of time is inherently more stressful and straining than just hitting it once, just like having to stand holding a heavy box for a long period of time is much more difficult than only having to pick it up briefly.
2. Having to hold a key down while hitting another key requires more effort even than holding down either by itself, since muscular strain is not additive but something like multiplicative.
3. Having to hold a key down and then hit another key (or hit two keys at the same time, which also brings in a timing and coordination difficulty) invariably leads to you having to stretch and contort your fingers and wrists – and thus the tendons inside them – to varying degrees in order to reach both keys at once. This gets more difficult nonlinearly with the amount of modifier keys required, while key arpeggios require constant effort no matter how complex the grammar of modifications becomes.

One might be tempted to bring out the stenographer's keyboard as a counterexample to my statements, but that's not so. The stenographer's keyboard reaches its level of efficiency and ergonomics not primarily from using the human body in a more ergonomic way, but by simply allowing you to get more across with a single key chord, therefore becoming significantly more efficient. Moreover, a proper stenographic keyboard is also laid out in a completely different way (as a piano-like double row of elongated keys) that makes doing chords not really require holding down keys at all!