The ironic thing is that the "standard" layout was an "innovation" upon earlier layouts, and you can easily imagine a long-time user of the IBM AT keyboard leveling the same kind of complaints: "Having the function keys on the left was so much better! Why did those stupid arrow keys have to get in the way and make the numpad so much further away from the main cluster?"

Of course it's not really the same since the AT design hadn't been around for decades, but it's worth remembering that keyboard evolution stopped at an essentially arbitrary point rather than at some imagined pinnacle of design.