Agreed, the distance your fingers travel is shorter and so it would stand to reason that for any given person they could cover that distance faster.
A large part of this article seems to have a problem with retraining. That the retraining of someone to Dvorak will be inefficient compared to them just getting better at Qwerty; this may be the case. The analogy that comes to mind is that of someone who learns another language in adulthood. In almost all cases that speaker will have an accent in the new language for the rest of their life. But, when new languages are learned as a child this isn't the case. Perhaps if you just lean Dvorak as your "native" keyboard these inefficiencies don't show up and the cost/benefit changes.
One could do what is done with software upgrades. New students learn Dvorak in typing class and everyone else can stay with Qwerty. This would give a generation-long deprecation period where nobody has to re-learn anything if they don't want. Since the complaint is with having to "re-learn" to type, this would avoid that.
A large part of this article seems to have a problem with retraining. That the retraining of someone to Dvorak will be inefficient compared to them just getting better at Qwerty; this may be the case. The analogy that comes to mind is that of someone who learns another language in adulthood. In almost all cases that speaker will have an accent in the new language for the rest of their life. But, when new languages are learned as a child this isn't the case. Perhaps if you just lean Dvorak as your "native" keyboard these inefficiencies don't show up and the cost/benefit changes.
One could do what is done with software upgrades. New students learn Dvorak in typing class and everyone else can stay with Qwerty. This would give a generation-long deprecation period where nobody has to re-learn anything if they don't want. Since the complaint is with having to "re-learn" to type, this would avoid that.