As I've done before, I gave SwiftKey a day off and tried out the new release of Fleksy. I've done that with one or two other keyboards, too...but they don't make it more than a couple of minutes.
While typing on Fleksy I thought to myself that something about the experience felt more like typing on a physical BlackBerry keyboard. That hadn't occurred to me when I have tried Fleksy in the past. I realized the next day that it is the layout. The second row of alpha characters (A, S, D...) is flush to both sides of the screen on the Fleksy keyboard (as on a BB keyboard). SwiftKey, etc. use more of the desktop keyboard layout with the (what I consider to be) wasted space of the indented second row .
This may sound like a minor thing, but I felt so much more comfortable with that layout on Fleksy (and I have been using an Android for going on 2 years, so I'm certainly used to the other style keyboard layout). I have long fingers and the extra room is probably just more ergonomic for me? Dunno.
However, pretty much everything else I like better on SwiftKey (especially predictions and the way they're implemented). By the way, I don't swipe at all, so those features don't matter to me.
So, I'm back to SwiftKey now. I did tweet @SwiftKey and request a theme with the BB/Fleksy type layout.They said they would pass it along, but who knows. For me, it could just be the one thing that makes SwiftKey a perfect app.