I wanted to chime in and revel in your company... Something similar (but never as bad as your painful description of AZERTY) happens with Spanish keyboards, and there are even varieties for different Latin American countries. As you mentioned, I finally found ever lasting peace when I switched to an ANSI-US keyboard, and never looked back. Thankfully my current employer defaults to these keyboards; it used to be a chore to provision them some years ago.

So, in short, I hear you brother!