Thank you for the feedback and kind words! (A fellow Dvorak-user, it sounds like?)
Yeah, I wasn't completely sold on double-directional as the control scheme but, with a little time, I got pretty used to it. Something like shift-direction was something I did consider but never took time to mess around with. I do think adding some sliding animation to the tiles would go a long way towards helping with this but I just didn't quite get there this weekend.