It was a bit easier to learn because most of the keys are on the same finger as on qwerty, but with the rows swapped. For me the biggest problem with using an alternate layout is that the hjkl vim movement keys are scattered.
Workman was slightly more difficult to learn, but that isn't really significant to me.
I've been typing with workman for a few years now, and am very happy with it.
(You could have some local shorthand to copy over your vimrc and explicitly start vim with a different copy, at which point you'll only have problems with shared tmux/screen sessions)
You still want i mapped somewhere. Do you put that on qwerty-i/norman-r? Now where do you put r? qwerty-r/norman-f? Where do you put f? qwerty-f/norman-t?
It's a mess. It would be much better if commands weren't so tightly associated with keys in vim.