Interesting history lesson.
Once again, historical reasons and cheap tech made people use and stick to the inferior solution. Pinky usage gives me cramps. I can press a and the keys above and below fine, but when I try to rest with index on d, my pinky hovers somewhere between keys or is cramping up trying to find the shift key. While not "natural" I am used to press and find keys with index on f. There is a nice bump on that key to find it while not looking.
Key bindings should be an essential and trivial part of all game engines, so devs would not have to think about it or spend time implementing it themselves. One should think. But apparantly that still is not so.